Experience

Started tutoring 1-on-1 straight out of high school. Loved it. Taught all levels of high-school mathematics at students' homes, libraries, and eventually at my family home.

After uni, I got a job at Matrix Education, a tutoring college. This was where I learned to teach groups. I very much enjoyed this, and making complex ideas click for students. I received the Mathematics Teacher of the Year Award in 2017. The joy of making things clear and simple—where they previously seemed hard and intimidating—was deeply satisfying.

I met Vlad, an entrepreneur, who dragged me into a startup. Though I loved tutoring, I wanted something else on my resume in case I wanted a "real job" down the line.

We designed, from scratch, a computer vision IoT system to monitor residents in aged care and prevent pressure injuries. We reduced pressure injuries by 84% and won the InnovAGEING National Award.

My main role was designing and training the machine learning algorithms. My math and stats background helped me learn quickly. This is also when I taught myself to code—mainly to train the algorithms, but also to build demos, so I dipped into software engineering too.

The experience of building something from scratch and seeing it make a real impact on people's lives built confidence.

Going years with low income also taught me it was possible to feel fulfilled even without a high salary—at least for a period of time.

The startup eventually ran out of money. The lesson? We needed to sell to the customer, not just the user. Awards, hospital pilots, and media coverage are proxies—they won't keep the company alive. We gave up when the funding ran out.

After PosiSense, I joined Spriggy. They were very accommodating—I told them I wanted to get better at software engineering since my role at PosiSense had been heavy on data science and ML, and I wanted to invest in this weakness.

My team was great and very supportive. Main highlights: learning a lot, working with a cool team, and experiencing a bigger company (still a startup, but not just three people for four years like PosiSense).

My next gig was at Symbiotech, working remotely from Vietnam. This was my first time doing firmware and programming in C—much more low-level. Debugging with hardware, using lights, etc. Cool stuff. Also my first time consulting.

Safe to say, it was a learning curve. The main challenge was getting stuck and overwhelmed trying to get the hardware working. Reflecting on it now, this was a good experience every engineer needs: getting stuck, staying calm, pacing yourself, and approaching things methodically.

I was hired as a senior, so I was no longer a junior learning the ropes. The main lesson was handling independence, ownership, and repeated roadblocks.

Two tech leads from Spriggy moved to nib and convinced me to come start up the automation initiative—automating tests where precision and volume were impossible to achieve manually.

This was my first time in a big organization. I was responsible for starting the whole automation initiative from scratch. I felt a shift in confidence here, as I worked through numerous technical hurdles under high pressure and made a big impact on the organization. I built authority and carved out my own space.

This is also where I started using AI-driven development tools heavily.