G’day,
I’m Dave

I work at the intersection of technology, strategy, and philosophy — helping organisations close the gap between business ambition and technical reality.

About Work Thoughts Contact

I’m a military officer turned MBA, turned philosopher, turned software architect. I’ve led organisations with hundreds of staff, managed 8 figure P&Ls, and built large-scale commercial systems.

An unusual path but one that taught me to connect why to how and what.

When software becomes an anchor rather than an asset, the code is rarely the problem. The problem is the gap between what the system was designed to do and what the business now needs. That gap accumulates until the software constrains every business decision.

That’s the problem I find interesting. Not because it’s technically complex — although sometimes it is — but because it sits in the space most people avoid: between the engineering team’s reality and the business leadership’s ambition.

This isn’t a competence issue. It’s structural. And it’s fixable.

Previous Adventures

  1. Software Architect

    2020 - Today

    I help organisations eliminate the technical obstacles to growth. I work with founders and leaders running Ruby on Rails systems to identify which technical constraints are creating strategic business drag and help their engineering teams eliminate them.

  2. Academic Philosopher

    2011 - 2020

    I studied, researched, and taught philosophy at the University of Queensland while undertaking an MA and PhD. My work centered around computational approaches to philosophy, understanding how large-scale data shapes decision-making and democracy, and building digital tools to improve critical thinking and reasoning. This period trained me to question assumptions, distinguish symptoms from causes, and reason clearly about complex systems.

  3. General Manager

    2005 - 2010

    After completing an MBA and traveling extensively, I worked as a consultant, team leader, and manager with Flight Centre before becoming General Manager of Wicked Campers. I managed over 100 staff across multiple states and countries and grew a $20M P&L at more than 20% year-on-year. This role grounded me in commercial reality: cash flow, operational constraints, incentives, and the difference between theoretical improvements and changes that actually move the business.

  4. Military Officer

    1994 - 2001

    I served as a Maritime Warfare Officer in the Royal Australian Navy, specialising in navigation and diving. At sea, I was responsible for the safety and operation of a $250M vessel and 175 sailors, often operating under uncertainty and time pressure. Military service taught me disciplined decision-making, accountability for outcomes, and how to act decisively with incomplete information—lessons that still shape how I approach risk in software and business.

Work

Rails · Architecture · Legacy Recovery

Ecommerce UX Intelligence Platform

A 100,000-line Rails application had become difficult to change safely. Controllers ran to 3,000 lines. Business logic was scattered across models, views, and callbacks. The team could ship features, but every change carried hidden risk. I helped them bring the application back under control—extracting domain logic into service objects, establishing clear module boundaries, and building test coverage to refactor with confidence.

Ruby on Rails · RSpec · Architecture

AI · Agentic Systems

Agentic Development with Ruby

Everyone talks about AI agents. I built one from scratch to understand how they actually work. The listen-think-act loop is about 10 lines of code. Tool calling is JSON schemas plus execution logic. This matters because LLMs are becoming part of every engineering stack—the teams that use them well understand the constraints and build systems that account for them.

Ruby · LLM · Anthropic API

GitHub →

Ruby Tooling · Dependency Analysis

Klarity

Large Rails codebases accumulate hidden dependencies. A change here breaks something there, and no one can explain why. Klarity is a static dependency analyzer that maps it out—inheritance chains, mixins, message sends, ActiveRecord associations, and dynamic method calls. The output is an interactive visualization where you can click a node and see everything it depends on.

Ruby · Static Analysis · HTML Visualization

GitHub →

Rails · Team Leadership · Platform Build

B2B EdTech SaaS

An international training organisation had outgrown their existing LMS. Accounting, CRM, and learning workflows were fragmented across three platforms. I led a small team to build an integrated LMS and CRM platform from scratch — license-based auth, video transcoding and streaming, and integrations that eliminated the manual work. Shipped to hundreds of thousands of users.

Ruby on Rails · AWS · Terraform · MediaConvert

EdTech · Product Design

Reasons

Critical thinking is hard to teach. Students struggle to see the structure of their own arguments. I built a platform for creating, editing, and sharing argument visualizations. Started as a Javascript canvas library, grew into a Rails application used in university courses. The design challenge was keeping it minimal enough to be useful without becoming a distraction.

Ruby on Rails · JavaScript · Canvas · Postgres

reasons.io →

Systems Thinking · Simulation

School Performance

A new approach to philosophy - arguments you can run. I built a self-executing simulation that tests whether school performance metrics actually measure school quality. Spoiler - they don't. Adjust the variables, watch the results, see the flaw in the logic.

HTML · JavaScript · Simulation

GitHub →

Science Communication · Critical Thinking

Climate Misinformation

Climate denial arguments persist because they feel intuitive, even when logically flawed. A team of three researchers, I developed a logical model that breaks down common misinformation patterns into their component reasoning errors—making the flaws visible and teachable. The paper reached the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetrics. The method transfers directly to engineering: when you map the structure of a faulty argument, the fix becomes obvious.

Critical Thinking · Argument Mapping · Research

IOP Science →

If the gap between your business ambition and your technical reality is starting to cost you, let’s talk.