Engineer and Physicist

My initial technical background, aside from years of programming, science and electronics at high school, was an undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering with coverage from dynamics, statics and electrodynamics to photonics, control and communications. Great stuff. Some luck helped me into Physics, Astrophysics and Acoustics with interludes in Hearing Physiology and Radio Astronomy. So how did I end up in Software Engineering?

Basically I did an apprenticeship under one of the smartest and charismatic people you could hope to meet. I give credit for my initial grounding in Engineering to my family, for my postgrad work to Pan and David, and for my career to Harry (*). The focus was on object-oriented design for underwater acoustics systems in a defence environment. Many of the concepts from my Honours and PhD work in holography, coherent optics, digital signal processing, classical multichannel feedback and adaptive feedforward control found new application in acoustic cameras, zoom FFT, inverse synthetic aperture and other areas within the field where I served my apprenticeship.

This blog is about the technical background and exploration of many of the concepts in the public domain and fundamental science and engineering that I apply, when necessary, in my day-to-day work. A big part of my role is opening up engineers' minds to a broader problem-solving toolkit than they may have from their own limited experience. Technical leadership in and R&D environment, with the emphasis on D, is a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding domain in which to work.

(*) Harry passed away in tragic circumstances. I owe a debt of gratitude to him, Ross and other at Nix for the opportunities and learning experiences they provided me with at that time.