The narrative — including the years that need explaining

Capability statement. Someone who learned by doing, in public, on deadlines, and who has kept learning after the deadlines stopped being someone else’s. The range is real and the gaps are stated.

The beginning

Programming started as a childhood interest in the 1980s, self-taught alongside art, music, philosophy and sport. The career proper started in the late 1990s building websites for an Australian car marketplace. When interactive front ends arrived — a creative layer that needed a technical spine — there was no course to take, so it was learned directly and immediately put into commercial work. That combination, creative front end with engineering underneath, has been the shape of the work ever since.

The agency years

Freelance in Melbourne, then full-time roles in the United Kingdom during the emergence of online gaming and interactive advertising, then back to freelance where the work was with the largest agencies and their clients — banks, broadcasters, drinks brands, publishers, a global energy company, a design software vendor. Most of it was delivered under deadlines that could not move, and a meaningful share of it was rescue work: rewriting someone else’s stalled project and shipping it on their date.

The other working life

Not all of it was software, and that is worth stating rather than hiding. Six roles outside technology — a ski chalet kitchen in the French Alps, wine service, guided horse tours in the Victorian high country, building a stable complex, state government administration, and thoroughbred stable work. They are the reason the engineering reads as practical: a kitchen at service and a production incident have the same shape.

The education

A fine arts degree with philosophy, a master’s in international relations and contemporary political theory, and study in music composition and economics. None of it is computer science, and all of it is used: systems thinking, argument, aesthetics, and the habit of asking what a thing is actually for.

2020 to 2026 — stated plainly

This period is on the page because a résumé that hides it invites the wrong question. It was spent as a full-time parent to two children while building in parallel:

• A digital signage business taken from idea to customers — the product, the deployments, the support.
• A site builder and CMS that carried the marketing for it.
• A lost-property tag system, deployed.
• A homelab that became the platform for everything else: declarative configuration, containers, backups, networking, public ingress.
• An AI estate — pipelines, routing, retrieval, voice, guardrails — built and operated on the same hardware.
• A deliberate move from PHP and front-end scripting into Go, systems work and platform engineering, and from hand-installed servers into reproducible configuration.

The honest framing is in the evidence notes and is repeated here: full-time parent, building in parallel. The output of those years is on the rest of this site and can be inspected.

What next

The same three areas at a larger scale: AI and agentic systems, the platform engineering underneath them, and the constrained devices at the edge. Melbourne based and flexible about location and format — remote, hybrid, office, or travel.

Contact policy

This site publishes no address, no phone number and no family details. Contact is by email, with the address supplied directly rather than scraped from a page. If a phone number belongs on the site, that is Sam’s decision to make and it is not made here.

Trade-offs and limits

• No computer science degree. The trade is a longer, broader practical education; the pages on this site are the argument, not the certificate.
• A period of self-employment is described as such. It is not dressed up as a sabbatical or as consulting.
• Interests are one honest sentence each. The previous version of this site invented venues and results. That has been deleted rather than corrected in place.

Drill-downs

• Non-IT working history — level 3
• Education — level 3
• Interests — one honest line each — level 3
• The AI estate — level 2
• The platform estate — level 2
• The edge fleet — level 2

Period and confidence

period: 1999–. Confidence is running: this is the current self-description, verified against the evidence notes on 2026-10-26.