Happiest when I can improve digital experiences.

Like a lot of designers and engineers, I grew up in front of a computer. Back then though, "online" meant dial-up, and being online meant the phone line was down. My time on the internet was limited, fragmented, and precious.

I wrote my first HTML at 12, building Wikipedia-style fan pages for an MMORPG I was obsessed with. I'd screenshot new updates, upload them to a WordPress site, write up my thoughts, and publish it to the world. Learning to bold text, build tables, and add hyperlinks felt like an adventure. There were no YouTube tutorials, no coding bootcamps, just trial, error, and stubbornness. That self-taught instinct has stayed with me ever since.

When Minecraft came out, I was 14, and I started making texture packs and character skins in Photoshop, often enjoying that more than actually playing the game. That led to my first real coding: writing JavaScript for Minecraft plugins and mods, letting players teleport to friends, save locations, manage an economy, and form groups. In school, that curiosity turned into building websites in Dreamweaver.

After high school, I didn't have a clear plan, but I knew two things: I wanted to help people, and I wanted to build things. At university I worked as a tutor, helping kids build confidence. From 2018 to 2020, I moved into healthcare as an NDIS support coordinator, helping people with disabilities access their community and build independence, including designing physically accessible respite homes long before I ever heard the term WCAG.

When lockdowns hit in 2020, I suddenly had time on my hands, and I used it to teach myself web development properly. That's where my career as a design engineer really began. As I learned the foundations of frontend development, I found myself drawn to UI/UX, a discipline that sits right at the intersection of intention and usability. It turned out my background in education and healthcare had quietly prepared me for exactly that: I already knew how to sit with someone, understand what they actually needed, and build towards it.

Over the past five years, I've designed and shipped end-to-end across fintech, insurance, payments, and government. I started as a sole trader running my own small agency, designing and building websites for my own clients. From there, I moved into an agency, which exposed me to commercial and enterprise work and sharpened my stakeholder alignment, communication, and presentation skills. Since then, I've worked as a contractor for larger organisations, leading a company-wide design system through a national rebrand at Compare Club, and turning a 30-page PDF into an accessible platform for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, work that ended up cited in CEFC's Annual Report to the Australian Parliament.

Alongside client work, I founded and built Beamo, a SaaS product, solo, taking it from idea through to a live, shipped product. These days I lean heavily on AI-assisted development (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to move faster from design intent to working code, and I'm actively deepening my backend skills to round out that full-stack picture.

The accessibility thread that started at Concept Care never really left. It's become one of the things I care about most in my work, and it's the direction I want to keep leaning into, not as a compliance checkbox, but as design grounded in a lived understanding of who gets left out when things aren't built well.

Design and building don't stop when I close the laptop. I've got a 3D printer I use to design and print my own things, I like getting my hands dirty working on cars, and I've built my own computers from parts. Lately that's extended into a handful of Raspberry Pi 5 projects: small, self-contained builds that scratch the same itch as everything else I do, taking something apart, understanding it, and making it better.