About · Wellington, New Zealand

I like understanding the whole system.

I’m Hamish. I build software, and I’m mostly interested in what happens at the edges of it: how organisations actually decide things, and which problems are worth the effort. I’m early in working that out.

Hamish Burke in Wellington

Current context

I work at Alphero as a web developer and take on a small number of independent projects.

There’s no NDA-covered client work on this site. What’s here is what I’m free to publish: things I built myself, finished freelance work, and a few technical studies.

What I’m working on getting good at

Things I keep coming back to.

  1. 01

    Shipping things that last

    Interfaces, content systems, integrations, and the release path. The release path usually decides whether the rest of it holds up.

  2. 02

    Seeing the whole system

    Data models, APIs, infrastructure, trust boundaries. I find the constraints more interesting than the features.

  3. 03

    Writing it down

    Keeping design notes and known limits current, while I still remember why I picked one option over another.

Background

From research into shipping software.

I did a Master of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington. My thesis was on diffusion-based anomaly detection for electrical distribution networks. Mostly it taught me the difference between an interesting result and a useful one.

Outside software I’m trying to make more time for reading, the piano, and being away from a screen.