About
Based in the Blue Mountains, Greater Sydney Region, working with healthcare teams, not-for-profits and small businesses.
Thirty years of making new technology work for the people using it.
In 1995 I was building touchscreen kiosks out of a Sydney warehouse. Since then it’s been CD‑ROMs and bank kiosks in Kuala Lumpur, then websites, e‑detail aids and patient support programs for pharmaceutical companies, as a designer, developer, producer, project manager and head of digital.
The technology changed every few years. The job didn’t: sit between the people who need something and the people who build it, and make sure it works for whoever uses it.
I’ve always handled the work around the build: scoping, project management, testing and documentation. With AI, those are the parts that decide whether a tool works, and these days I build the tools as well.
Based in
Blue Mountains, AU
Works in
English
Usual hours
09:00 to 17:30 SYD/AU
The desk, around four
Four steps, and you can stop after any of them.
A first conversation.
30 minutes, free, by phone or video. Bring the task that’s eating the most time. I’ll tell you whether AI is the right answer, and whether I’m the right person.
Discovery.
Sized to the job: part of the quote for a small skill, about a week for a tool, a few weeks for an application, with a prototype. You get a written plan covering what’s involved, how it will work, and a timeline, and it’s yours to keep. On bigger projects, the timeline firms up as we go.
Build and test.
I build it with your subject matter experts, the people who do the work every day. They test it with me, because they’re the best judges of whether it works.
Hand over.
Documented, so your team can run it and change it. If you’d rather I keep looking after it, there’s a monthly arrangement.
Experience
Currently
Vaultia, Brandunity and contract work
Over
On AI
Every task has three kinds of worker to choose from: plain code, AI or a person. Picking the right one for each step matters more than picking the tool.
“There are three actors here, and the design keeps them separate on purpose: the engineer, the code, and the agents. The trick is not running more agents. The trick is using all three at the right moment.”
IndyDevDan, Super Simple Software Factory, 2026
Code
Rules that don’t change, run the same way every time.
AI
The messy inputs (emails, documents, notes), with a person checking the result.
People
The decisions someone has to stand behind.
Most jobs don’t need an agent.
Feeling fast isn’t being fast.
A Workday survey of 3,200 people using AI at large companies found nearly 40% of the time it saved them went back into correcting, rewriting and checking its work. So I measure the result, not how it felt.
The last call stays with a person.
AI is good at the first pass: reading, sorting, flagging. The decision that goes out under your name stays with someone on your team. In the proof checker I built, the AI flags and a person makes every edit.
Clients I’ve worked with
Novo Nordisk
GSK
Gilead
Allergan
Boehringer Ingelheim
Reckitt Benckiser
Abbott
Novartis
Experience
2026 to now
Co-founder
Now
Vaultia
·
Sydney
A private AI platform for healthcare, built on AWS, where each client owns its content. I’m building it with my co-founder, Giri. vaultia.ai
2025 to now
Independent contractor
Now
AI tools and workflows
·
Sydney
I work alongside existing teams, between the business goals, the design and the build, and help them use AI where it earns its place. At a healthcare agency I interviewed staff about what they expected and what worried them, turned that into a plan, and we then proposed a pilot with the medical writers and built it.
For a small business buried in email, I mapped the whole onboarding workflow into four areas and am automating it, some with plain workflows and some with AI agents, whichever suits. I’m also building a dashboard that brings their ads, shop and customer records into one view, with insights they can act on. I still make visuals and video with AI, because I enjoy it.
2021 to now
Co-founder
Now
Brandunity
·
Sydney
I co-founded Brandunity with my partner in 2021. We do branding, Google Ads, SEO, design and websites, and I also take freelance contract work for other agencies. The clients are healthcare agencies, not-for-profits across Australia, and small to medium businesses, from trades to start-ups. We have worked with more than 70 clients. It is the brand I still work under.
2017 to 2022
Head of digital
Ogilvy Health Australia
·
Sydney
I took over as head of digital while the agency I was already working for, Sudler & Hennessey, was being merged into Ogilvy Health. For a while I split my time between the two, with one freelance digital producer, until the merger was complete. I led digital strategy, new business pitches, search, analytics and reporting, social, and personalisation and automation. Smaller builds, such as emails, went to offshore partners, so the work crossed time zones with our partners and the clients’ global teams in the UK and Europe.
The larger work was patient familiarisation and support programs, about six or seven of them, built from scratch on Drupal. I took each from scoping, diagrams and wireframes through design, development and testing, then ran it after go-live: support, weekly and monthly reports, and liaising with the pharmaceutical client over orders. The areas included oncology, diabetes, smoking cessation, opioid use disorder, pet parasites, infant nutrition, pulmonary hypertension and vaccines. I also built two or three education platforms for healthcare providers, using SCORM-compliant content. In 2022 I moved to a four-day week as senior digital project manager, running websites, apps, advertising, email and search to scope, time and budget.
2016 to 2018
Head of digital
Sudler & Hennessey
·
Sydney
I was the agency’s head of digital, and for the first year I did it on my own. I managed product, UX design, conversion optimisation and web operations for clients, produced and project-managed the work, and was the face of digital for the business, with offshore suppliers doing most of the production. The work was websites, e-detail aids, email campaigns and the occasional custom-built project. Grey Healthcare merged into the agency, then the agency merged into Ogilvy Health, and from 2017 I split my time between the two.
2009 to 2016
Digital business director
Ward6 Australia
·
Sydney
I arrived as digital business director and head of digital, the only digital person, with a plan to build a team around the digital work we sold to clients. Over seven years it grew to seven or eight people: project managers and producers, digital designers, front-end and back-end developers, and an iOS developer for our e-detail aid platform. I worked with the other heads of department on bringing on new clients and growth strategy, tracked traffic and conversion against targets, and planned campaign, content and video strategy with the marketing team. Clients included Gilead, Allergan, GSK, Boehringer Ingelheim, Reckitt Benckiser, Novo Nordisk, Abbott, Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur.
The e-detail platform was all HTML, built for the iPad, so reps could take interactive tools to a doctor in place of a slide deck: a cost calculator linked to adherence, a patient profiler, a cardiovascular risk calculator for HIV patients, a pill burden calculator, and a treatment simulator where doctors chose tests and treatments for a patient and then saw how their decisions compared with their peers’. It tracked pages visited, times and how long each conversation ran, and recorded the doctor’s reaction. I scoped and wireframed these, and later oversaw the team that designed and built them. I was also digital project lead, producer and designer on Changing Diabetes for Novo Nordisk, a CPD-accredited online platform with live and on-demand webinars and assignments before and after each workshop, which Ward6 ran for the client.
2009
Technical officer (contract)
Australian Museum
·
Sydney
The museum was building a new website for its Ichthyology (fish) collection and had to migrate existing and archived content onto it. I populated the site, sourced images, and photographed specimens from the collection, working through the fish catalogue from A to Z.
1998 to 2009
Co-founder and head of digital
MotionWorks
·
Kuala Lumpur
MotionWorks began when SPIG landed the Proton Edar account, and we grew from three people to more than twenty. I headed the designers and copywriters and worked with the technical lead, so the work was sound to build and considered for the people using it, at a time when “UX” was rarely said. We built websites and online booking systems for Proton Edar, ran the servers in our own office, made an interactive CD-ROM in Macromedia Director for each buyer of a new car, and a 3D car customiser that ran as a browser plug-in: paint, wheels, tint, with the doors, boot and bonnet opening.
We also built touchscreen kiosks, including one on the technology of F1 at Petrosains Discovery Centre, and others for financial institutions such as Bank Negara and Koperasi Tentera. In 2007 I co-founded MWCode with another developer, to build our own software, including a website CMS.
1997 to 1998
Designer and developer
SPIG Technology
·
Kuala Lumpur
After graduating I moved to Malaysia to join a few entrepreneurs with sales and development backgrounds, as the designer and developer. We were three. We built websites in Flash, mostly for musicians, photographers and other creative people, because it was far more interactive than HTML at the time, and offered graphic design. When we won Proton Edar, SPIG became MotionWorks.
1995 to 1996
Partner, designer and developer
MediaShift
·
Sydney
At the end of my design degree I joined a partner who built touchscreen kiosk shells and the technology behind them, but had no content, design or development. I did that: the software, animation, 3D and sound, using IconAuthor and 3D tools on Silicon Graphics machines that SGI lent us to test while we built. We worked out of a warehouse, in an office we built ourselves, making kiosk applications, 3D maps and visualisations, including one for the QVB.
Education
Bachelor of Design
UNSW, Sydney
1991 to 1995
Secondary school
Waverley College, Sydney
1985 to 1990
Daily tools
Claude Code
Claude
MCP
n8n
Amazon Bedrock
Strands Agents
Nano Banana
Figma
Framer
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
shadcn/ui
Python
Supabase
AWS
Vercel
Docker
GitHub
Playwright
Notion
Google Ads
WordPress
Node.js
Adobe
Kind words
Mai is the only person I’ve worked with who can argue about a spring curve and a database index in the same meeting, and be right about both.
Ruben Kessler
CTO, Halfday
We stopped doing handoffs when she joined. The prototype simply became the product, and we shipped a quarter early.
Anouk Sterk
Founder, Ledgerline
Her components were documented so well that our interns shipped a change in their first week.
Jonas De Wit
Engineering lead, Studio Kestrel
Based in the Blue Mountains
Open to contract work
If you’re working out where AI fits in your team, I’d like to hear about it.
Email or LinkedIn is the easiest way to reach me.