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Documenter 286aa12bb0 site: cut the template's own labels out of the pages

Point 7 of the page-wording review. The pages no longer show their data
structure as headings, and they no longer explain their own conventions.

- Level 1 is one screen: claim, status badge, three figures, the technology
  row, and one sentence carrying one link. Measured in headless Chrome at
  1440x900: 1404-1845 px tall before, exactly 900 px (no scroll) after, on
  all six area pages.
- DocPage: no kicker line, no visible level label, no "Evidence for this
  page" heading or instruction note, no "Drill-downs" list, no
  "Status <word> - sentence" footer. The artefact table starts at level 2,
  under the heading "Artefacts"; the history timeline is level 2 only.
- Landing page: "Start here" link text gone, "How to read this site" panel
  gone, the footer's status-label explainer gone.
- Content, presentation only, no claim softened: the leading H1 that
  duplicated the page title removed from all 41 documents; level 1 bodies
  reduced to the constraint as ordinary prose plus the way in;
  "**Status: ...**" prefixes removed from the artefact stubs; "## Drill-downs"
  and "## Period and confidence" removed from the level 2 pages, with the
  cross-area links moved into the prose.
- The six level 1 claims are now sentences with a subject, and use commas
  instead of middots. Same facts, no new ones.

Not in this commit: the 35 level 2 and 3 claims still use the compact CV
style. That is a voice decision for Sam, not a wording tidy-up.

make validate: 41 documents, 0 violations. go test ./...: pass.

(cherry picked from commit 03009f80fc7815ad7719412e125df9297a6e653f)

2026-10-28 15:55:33 +11:00

5.0 KiB

Raw Blame History

id, area, level, title, claim, confidence, period, tech, metrics, artefacts, public, last_verified, tags

area

level

title

claim

confidence

period

tech

metrics

artefacts

public

last_verified

The narrative — including the years that need explaining

Capability statement. Someone who learned by doing, in public, on deadlines, and who has kept learning after the deadlines stopped being someone else's. The range is real and the gaps are stated.

The beginning

Programming started as a childhood interest in the 1980s, self-taught alongside art, music, philosophy and sport. The career proper started in the late 1990s building websites for an Australian car marketplace. When interactive front ends arrived — a creative layer that needed a technical spine — there was no course to take, so it was learned directly and immediately put into commercial work. That combination, creative front end with engineering underneath, has been the shape of the work ever since.

The agency years

Freelance in Melbourne, then full-time roles in the United Kingdom during the emergence of online gaming and interactive advertising, then back to freelance where the work was with the largest agencies and their clients — banks, broadcasters, drinks brands, publishers, a global energy company, a design software vendor. Most of it was delivered under deadlines that could not move, and a meaningful share of it was rescue work: rewriting someone else's stalled project and shipping it on their date.

The other working life

Not all of it was software, and that is worth stating rather than hiding. Six roles outside technology — a ski chalet kitchen in the French Alps, wine service, guided horse tours in the Victorian high country, building a stable complex, state government administration, and thoroughbred stable work. They are the reason the engineering reads as practical: a kitchen at service and a production incident have the same shape.

The education

A fine arts degree with philosophy, a master's in international relations and contemporary political theory, and study in music composition and economics. None of it is computer science, and all of it is used: systems thinking, argument, aesthetics, and the habit of asking what a thing is actually for.

2020 to 2026 — stated plainly

This period is on the page because a résumé that hides it invites the wrong question. It was spent as a full-time parent to two children while building in parallel:

A digital signage business taken from idea to customers — the product, the deployments, the support.
A site builder and CMS that carried the marketing for it.
A lost-property tag system, deployed.
A homelab that became the platform for everything else: declarative configuration, containers, backups, networking, public ingress.
An AI estate — pipelines, routing, retrieval, voice, guardrails — built and operated on the same hardware.
A deliberate move from PHP and front-end scripting into Go, systems work and platform engineering, and from hand-installed servers into reproducible configuration.

The honest framing is in the evidence notes and is repeated here: full-time parent, building in parallel. The output of those years is on the rest of this site and can be inspected.

What next

The same three areas at a larger scale: AI and agentic systems, the platform engineering underneath them, and the constrained devices at the edge. Melbourne based and flexible about location and format — remote, hybrid, office, or travel.

Contact policy

This site publishes no address, no phone number and no family details. Contact is by email, with the address supplied directly rather than scraped from a page. If a phone number belongs on the site, that is Sam's decision to make and it is not made here.

Trade-offs and limits

No computer science degree. The trade is a longer, broader practical education; the pages on this site are the argument, not the certificate.
A period of self-employment is described as such. It is not dressed up as a sabbatical or as consulting.
Interests are one honest sentence each. The previous version of this site invented venues and results. That has been deleted rather than corrected in place.

5.0 KiB Raw Blame History Unescape Escape