About me
How I Got Here (The Short Version)
The Professional Stuff
I have more than 15 years of software development and engineering leadership experience. I've been the engineer turned architect, then team lead, then engineering leader responsible for multiple disciplines, delivery streams, and teams across medium-sized businesses and enterprise-scale organisations.
I've built teams, shipped products, and led cross-functional, geographically distributed groups across multiple teams to ship systems used in high-stakes marine survey and asset-integrity work, combining AWS-based data pipelines, near-real-time video streaming, and high-performance 3D visualisation.
Before moving into broader leadership 10 years ago, I spent years hands-on: building web applications, developing 3D training simulators for mining, and contributing to mission-critical telecom systems. AI-assisted/agentic software engineering has reignited my love of building. I spend an obscene amount of my time reading, learning, and playing with the latest tools and techniques in this rapidly evolving landscape.
Where Coaching Fits In
I discovered coaching while in leadership roles, particularly after reading Michael Bungay-Stanier's The Coaching Habit and David L. Marquet's Turn the Ship Around. The impact I saw on myself and my teams was so significant that I decided to formalise my skills with a Graduate Certificate of Applied Coaching, and subsequently earned my Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential from the International Coaching Federation (ICF), which ultimately lead to you reading this!
Leadership is learnable, but training is not enough. Coaching helps people wrestle with the complexity of their context and apply what you know in ways that work.
How I Got Here (The Longer Version)
Before software
I started working at sixteen, baking pizzas at a takeaway in South Africa, then “upgraded” to waiting tables (tip income only, the standard for South African waitstaff at the time).
More restaurant jobs followed, then manual and service work across three countries: kitchen portering in a London pub, summer-camp work on the Isle of Wight, photo-lab retail, warehouse shifts and labouring on a salmon farm in Ullapool, Scotland (the commute involved a boat and a floating platform on a loch). I also taught English in Odessa, Ukraine.
I finally got to university at twenty-five when distance learning made it affordable. A first-year computer science elective turned a Physics degree into Physics & Computer Science, followed by an Honours in Computing: seven years of evenings and weekends from 2010 to 2017, self-funded alongside full-time work. I dropped out of my MSc in Computing after we moved to Australia in 2018.
My first professional job was as a software engineer in South Africa at twenty-eight. I moved from writing software to leading software product and engineering organisations. That path taught me the difference between being technically capable and creating the conditions in which a team can do excellent work. You get your ass kicked fast when ~30 people build faster than you can review.
Engineering leadership led me to coaching
Technical brilliance does not automatically become leadership effectiveness. I wanted a deeper practice for helping people think, change and lead, so I completed a Graduate Certificate of Applied Coaching through ACAP University College and earned the International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach credential in 2025.
That capability has been supporting my leadership for a long time, and is fundamental to everything on offer through front left. Changing tools is easy compared with changing judgment, habits, and confidence.
AI-first workflows. Human-centred organisations.
I am interested in helping organisations keep the investment they already make in people and radically increase the customer value, ambition, speed and quality that investment can produce.
I am much less interested in using transformation language to decorate a redundancy programme.