Who Am I?

I've always been into video games and skateboarding. As an adolescent, that was my world, but my first dream was to be a brain-surgeon.

I started building software before I understood what I was doing. At 11, I was running a self-hosted Runescape private server in Java, I learnt from a textbook provided to me by my aunt's friend Clint who was a C# programmer. By 13, I was writing IRC bots. At 14, I hardware jailbroke a PS3 and created one of the most downloaded multiplayer patches for Modern Warfare 2, receiving 12 pages of forum feedback from players around the world.

By 16, I had rack-mounted Xeon servers running virtualized Linux clusters in my bedroom, hand-configured firewalls, and was hosting community game servers.

The skatepark and the server rack were my two worlds. I studied Art, Modern History and Entertainment in high school because I've always been interested in that sort of art and culture.

Later, I was sent to AIE — an art and game design school in Ultimo — by my art teacher and headmaster who wanted to encourage me to study game development. That was a cool moment for me, and it's where I started to see how I could combine my interests with education.

I didn't always have support. There was pressure to send me to manual labour discipline camps—but I held onto the belief that I belonged in engineering.