Hi! I'm Brett,

a platform engineer and systems architect based in Sydney.

I've been deploying software for over 20 years. Let's talk.

I joined the Remote.com AI and Knowledge Management team in 2023. On this team I was technical lead for a number of projects:

• Knowledge Management & AI Governance Data Pipeline
• AI Support Chatbot
• AI Support Email Auto-Responder
• AI Evaluation Framework
• Ask An Expert (backend)

I began consulting for a global entertainment company in 2021. I lead the project to restructure and dismantle a Kafka-based event-sourcing system costing the business tens of thousands of pounds every quarter in infrastructure costs.

SplitFire is an independent game I released which allows 2 players to battle head-to-head on a single mobile device.

I joined Wi5 in 2018, and worked as Tech Lead working predominately on their architecture, AWS infrastructure, and building their Point-of-Sale integrations and payment processing systems. Wi5 was a POS integrated Order & Pay system for the hospitality industry. Wi5 has since pivotted to focus on payment processing and renamed to “Onvi”.

One of the greatest features of the GIT version control system is its ability to rewrite local history before pushing it to a remote repository.

You might have read the infamous blog posts titled “Rails is Dead”, but I have seen development teams flounder over and over again when they try and reinvent the wheel using NodeJS on the backend.

The “greenfield” project is known by developers as a productivity Nirvana. It is a beautiful place where there is no legacy, no bugs and endless possibilities. It is also littered with mines.

I’ve recently seen a number of anti-patterns around the creation and early growth new projects, and thought I’d summarize the anti-patterns I’d seen in the past as a guide for developers to avoid these common pitfalls.

Immerse is a VR startup based in London, UK. Immerse provides an enterprise virtual reality CMS and Unity SDK . I joined the company in 2017 as their lead DevOps Engineer to lead the company’s effort in becoming a global VR platform.

Quiqup is a realtime delivery platform.

Quiqup provides a customer-facing iOS application which allows customers to order from any restaurant or store in London and get it delivered within minutes.

I love the Unity framework. It’s my go-to framework for games development, and a cornerstone of the technology my company Immerse builds.

Quiqup is a realtime delivery platform.

Quiqup provides a customer-facing iOS application which allows customers to order from any restaurant or store in London and get it delivered within minutes.

In addition, Quiqup provides a B2B web application and a RESTful API for integrating their delivery platform into any eCommerce system.

I joined Quiqup in 2015 as a senior full-stack developer as we were pivoting from a customer-facing application, to a more enterprise offering; as well as expanding into Dubai and other locations.

FlexibleConfig promotes good OOP design, and the separation of logic and configuration in your Ruby classes.

FlexibleConfig allows you to set class constants cleanly in ruby with the heirarchical structure and clean workflow of YML config, without sacrificing the flexibility and immediacy of ENVironment variables.

The Ruby on Rails framework often gets a lot of hate over the years.

Rails makes it easy to get up and running quickly. Unfortunately, its beginner-friendly approach leaves you high and dry months later when you have thousands of lines of code.

Rails applications of this type are often referred to as Rails monoliths.

One of the best ways to refactor and save an aging Rails monolith, is to extract service objects.

In these videos we create a “base service” which allows us to easily build service objects with powerful error handling and chaining capabilities.

Grouper is an “Offline Social Club” who joined YCombinator in 2012.

In 2013 Grouper decided to pivot towards a mobile-first experience, and I was brought onboard contracting as a senior full-stack developer.

I worked under the guidance of Tom Blomfield, Tom Brown and Michael Waxman to deliver the backend services that powered the platform.

RSpec Describe Method is a ruby gem that provides a shorthand for testing specific methods of classes.

It supports both instance methods and class methods, with or without arguments.

Adds a super simple method to describe RSpec situations in terms of smaller situation blocks.

Define a situation with the ‘situation’ method. Add a symbol key to identify the situation, and add an optional description if you like, and pass in a block creating the situation.

Grouper is an “Offline Social Club” who joined YCombinator in 2012.

In 2013 Grouper decided to pivot towards a mobile-first experience, and I was brought onboard contracting as a senior full-stack developer.

I worked under the guidance of Tom Blomfield, Tom Brown and Michael Waxman to deliver the backend services that powered the platform.

As part of an ongoing initiative, we frequenlty built off-shoot products and experiments in order to test our assumptions about our market. Each iteration went from conception to market in less than 2 weeks.

Cocoach is a business coaching and business management application for real-time collaboration, document creation and project management.