Hi, I'm David.

I'm an engineering leader based in Sydney, and this is where I write about software, the teams that build it, and where engineering crosses into product, design, and AI.

What I do

These days I'm an Engineering Manager at Nine, one of Australia's largest media companies. My focus is publishing architecture — the systems that get journalism in front of readers, reliably and at scale.

I've worn a few hats at Nine over the years. Before publishing architecture I led the Metro Web team — the people behind the websites for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WAtoday and Brisbane Times — and before that I led a team in commercial products, responsible for the application Nine uses to manage advertising inventory for broadcast: a decade-old system handling over a billion dollars in revenue and used by more than six hundred people every day. Working on software that real people depend on, day in and day out, is the part of the job I love most.

How I got here

I've been building for the web since the late '90s, back when "making a website" meant tables, spacer GIFs, and a lot of patience. I cut my teeth on some of Australia's best-known sites — Vogue, news.com.au, finder — first as a front-end developer and architect, then gradually shifting from writing the code to growing the people who write it. Engineering leadership has been my craft for a good while now: before Nine I led teams at Compono, Deputy, and Scentre Group (the people behind Westfield), and I've worn the agile-coach hat plenty of times along the way. I still care deeply about the technical detail — I just care about the humans doing the work even more.

Beyond the day job

Bringing people together has been a thread running through my whole career. At Bigcommerce I grew the in-house meetup — the Sydney Web Apps Group — into a 600-strong community, and I spent a stint teaching front-end at General Assembly. In 2013 I co-founded SydCSS, a meetup for Sydney's front-end folks that ran every other month and grew into one of the city's friendliest tech communities, regularly drawing crowds of over a hundred. It wrapped up a couple of years ago, but the urge to get people learning from one another never really left — it's a big part of why I write here.

There's also a side project I'm a little too fond of: Sheep Game. It started life as a Flash game back in 2001, and I've rebuilt it four times since, with versions on PC and Xbox over the years. The latest, Too Many Sheep, is a local multiplayer game on Steam. Making small video games is how I hold on to the simple joy of building something just because it's fun.

What I write about

Expect posts on software and engineering leadership: how teams actually get things done, what changes when you're responsible for outcomes rather than output, and the messy, interesting space where engineering meets product, design, and — increasingly — AI. I try to write the kind of thing I'd have found useful earlier in my career: honest, practical, and free of hype.

Talks

I've been speaking at meetups and conferences for over a decade, usually about the human side of engineering. A few of my talks live right here on the site:

Most recently I spoke at AI Engineer in Melbourne, on what it really takes to put AI to work inside an engineering org. You'll find the rest on the videos page.

Elsewhere

You'll find me on LinkedIn — that's the best place to reach me if you've got a question, a disagreement, or just want to say hi.