I was born in Canada and moved to New Zealand when I was about four years old. I learned piano from a young age, and began learning saxophone as well during high school at Orewa College. It was during this time that a group of friends and I taught ourselves the basics of C++ (it's a wonder I didn't give up then and there) and I got into tramping as part of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award (which I completed to the Gold Award).

In 2006, I started conjoint undergraduate degrees in Engineering (specialising in Software Engineering) and Commerce (double majoring in Economics and International Business) at the University of Auckland. I was a founding member of the Software Engineering Students Association (SESA) in 2007 and joined the executive team the following year. I helped grow and run the club through to 2014, including serving as President in 2013, and Vice President in 2012 & 2014. Unlike many university clubs that only last while the founding members are around, SESA continues to help SE students at the university to this day.

After finishing my undergraduate degrees in 2010 and an internship at Google, I started a Ph.D. in late 2011. For my doctorate I investigated better ways to teach computers complex sequential tasks, by enabling computers to learn from and generalise many examples of tasks being carried out by humans. The particular application I focused on is the Real-Time Strategy game Starcraft, because it's a very complex task that humans were (at the time) still much better at than computers, there are plenty of examples of human experts playing the game (replays), and there is a nice API to programmatically interact with the game.

After my PhD I moved to Sydney to work at Google.

I also enjoy competing in programming competitions and game jams, as well as playing badminton and video games - in particular, RTS games, simulation / puzzle / building games, open-world RPG's, and any Zelda games. My favourite programming languages are Python (for little stuff) and Java (for big stuff). I'm also familiar with HTML/CSS/JS and C, C++ and a few others.