About

I’m based in Auckland, studying Rust, Python, and machine learning, and building software I actually use. Before all this I spent fifteen years as a live-sound audio engineer, and that hands-on, make-it-work-in-the-room instinct still shapes how I build.

Most of what I make is personal infrastructure I actually use. A New Zealand–resident alternative to the big-platform stack, assembled from unmodified open-source apps and run on my own hardware. A streaming aggregator that knows which titles are free to watch right now in New Zealand. A personal finance dashboard on an open-banking API, a voice clone of my own voice, a fully-local smart-home design, this site, and the local AI agent that writes its weekly digest — all of it built around Ollama models running on the RTX 3070 in this PC, never reaching out to a hosted service. Some projects I’ve also retired on purpose, and written honest post-mortems about why.

My guiding rule is to assemble, don’t reinvent: build on mature open source and spend the real effort on integration, identity, and the parts that are genuinely mine. Data residency and privacy aren’t features I bolt on — they’re the point. No ads, no behavioural tracking, no third-party scripts.

And I’m honest about how I work: I’m an AI-leveraged operator, not a hand-coder. The value I add is judgment, direction, and shipping decisions — what to build, why, what shape it should take, and when to cut scope. The implementation gets done with AI alongside me; the editorial and architectural calls are mine.