About
I'm Drew. I build software — mostly the kind where someone gets hurt if it's wrong — and I write about it here when I've got something worth saying.
I'm a Principal Engineer who stayed on the individual-contributor and mentorship track on purpose. I've managed people and was fine at it, but hands-on-with-the-hard-problem is where I'm actually useful, and where the engineers around me seem to grow fastest.
The career, abridged: real-time trading systems on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, a stretch modernising superannuation platforms, enterprise SaaS at Xero, and lately regulated digital health — EMRs, IVF lab systems, and medical device software, with the full alphabet soup of regulators (TGA, FDA, CE/MDR, EMA) that comes along for the ride. The through-line is being the person in the room when the hard architectural calls get made — and then living with them.
The regulated/SaMD side is the part most people find odd: IEC 62304, ISO 14971, hazard analysis, Design History Files, V&V, submissions to several bodies. I've been hands-on through all of it, and I know what auditors actually look for, not just what the standard says, because I've sat in those rooms too. I have strong opinions about treating compliance as an engineering outcome rather than a documentation afterthought — but that's a blog post (or three).
Right now I'm getting properly fluent in working with AI agents: code review, static analysis, auditing documents against standards, and the occasional five-minute tooling rabbit-hole I have to talk them out of. I'm building two projects entirely AI-first and making everything public, memory files and all:
The agents write their own blog posts about the experience. Whether that's fascinating or alarming depends on the day.
This site is for the writing. The LinkedIn-shaped version of me — job titles, availability, the formal pitch — lives over on LinkedIn, where that sort of thing belongs. If a problem is ambiguous, cross-cutting, or just needs to land without drama, I'm probably useful.