After 6 years working at Amazon, I decided to take a career break in late 2022 to explore some of my interests - a cross section of sustainability and housing. I've been volunteering at two different Seattle-based housing nonprofits with my time off: Sound Foundations NW, which focuses on building tiny homes for people who … Continue reading Building Tiny Homes in Seattle
My Ode to Twitter
One thousand, nine hundred and seventy tweets. That’s my entire tweet history, fourteen years of my digital life (I guess more like the first seven, until I stopped tweeting around 2016). That tiny number doesn't really convey what Twitter meant to me: the relationships it created, and the opportunities I received. If I were to … Continue reading My Ode to Twitter
Six Months in Seattle
Edit: I found this in my drafts folder after six years (!) I did some minor edits, but it's otherwise a snapshot of our lives in mid-March, 2017, and it made me laugh as well as brought up a bunch of nostalgia. Yes, I can't believe it's been six months already! There's a lot to … Continue reading Six Months in Seattle
Diversity at NDC London
Jakob Bradford, Jon Skeet, Chris O'Dell and I have exchanged a number of emails, Google Hangouts, and suggestions in the past few months that could be used to improve diversity at NDC conferences. I was a speaker at NDC Sydney, and it was one of the most heavily gender skewed events I had attended in years. Ultimately, NDC … Continue reading Diversity at NDC London
NDC Sydney
NDC Sydney wrapped up last month, and because it happened between a bunch of other things (preparing for our move to Seattle, recording the podcast with Scott Hanselman, a conference call with Jon Skeet & Jakob Bradford - post coming soon!), I hadn't take the time to digest it all. My talk First, my talk - Video Transcoding … Continue reading NDC Sydney
My podcast with Scott Hanselman
Yes, that's right - I recorded a podcast with Scott Hanselman 😀 There's a story behind it too... I bumped into Scott at NDC Sydney. It was the evening before the main conference started, and we were both helping out with the Kids Code Club. We started chatting about what I was presenting on Thursday - video transcoding systems, … Continue reading My podcast with Scott Hanselman
Lessons learned in Public Speaking
Every year, I try to learn something new. 2014 was javascript, 2015 was back to CS fundamentals, and 2016 is my Year Of Public Speaking. I've been lucky to be able to present the same talk multiple times this year, which is an overview of the new video transcoding system we built at the ABC: Internal presentation at … Continue reading Lessons learned in Public Speaking
Presenting at YOW! Nights in April
Following on from last night's presentation at the ABC on our new transcoding service, Metro (which went really well!) I'm excited to announce that I'll be presenting the same content in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, thanks to YOW! Metro currently transcodes all the content for ABC iview and has successfully processed thousands of pieces of content since launch in December … Continue reading Presenting at YOW! Nights in April
“Developer-esque” relations
It's not technically my official job, but I do some "developer-esque" relations for the ABC's Digital Network division. I started doing it because I like it, and it's been very educational. To clarify, the phrase "developer relations" could be interpreted in a couple of ways: Your company has products or services it sells, and you're trying to help people in the … Continue reading “Developer-esque” relations
Metro: the ABC’s new Media Transcoding Pipeline
In December last year, the ABC launched a new video encoding system called Metro ("Media Transcoder"), which converts various sources of media into a standardised format for iview. It's been a fantastic project for the ABC's Digital Network division - we've built a cheap, scalable, cloud-based solution that we can customise to suit our specific … Continue reading Metro: the ABC’s new Media Transcoding Pipeline
coding, cake and travel 