When I first visited Perth 17 years ago I had no idea that I’d be sewing the seeds of an intercontinental move and finding a company that has the same whacky ideals that I have. I was working at the Natural History Museum in London at the time and we were just starting to grow our family (2 adults, 1 child). While here I did some googling and found a company that seemed to be interested in the confluence of biology and technology that I had arrived at from initially studying Botany and then through that getting involved in collections databases. Anyway fast-forward a couple of years, a lot of to and fro via email with Piers and the start of the Atlas of Living Australia, and we (2 adults, 2 children) arrived in Perth on May the 4th (I kid you not) 2010 and I started as a developer at the young but growing company of Gaia Resources a couple of months later.
Since then I’ve been part of the development team (now known as the Software Engineering Guild!) here at Gaia. I went from somebody who was reasonably familiar with git and Drupal with a bit of PHP on the side to learning about loads of different languages (🪦 Java*, 🪦 VBA, 🐍Python, TypeScript ⌨️ ), frameworks (🪦Phonegap, 🪦 Titanium, 🪦 Knockout, React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap, Django, FastAPI) and open source solutions that we have worked with at Gaia over the years. In that time PHP has re-re-invented itself as a proper object oriented language with modern toolsets (Laravel, Symfony, Drupal), JavaScript became server side (🪦Rhino, Node, Deno), Python has become the (current) king of backend and Microsoft became one of the greatest contributors to open source !??!? (GitHub, VSCode, TypeScript). iPads and tablet computers became widespread, (smart)phones have become the companions we see them as today.
I’ve worked on loads of projects at Gaia but those that really stand out for me are:
- Environment:
- Going out bush with the dev team in a BushBlitz to Ned’s Corner in Victoria
- Biodiversity Snapshots
- Birds in Backyards
- Corals of the World
- Implementation of the Biodiversity Information Office for WA
- Collections
- State Records office of Western Australia
- Working with fantastic museum collections clients at CSIRO, RWAHS, WA Museum and Flinders University and Tasmanian collecting institutions
- Working closely with the archivists at the Public Record Office Victoria (PROV)
- Other
- Working with partners at Liquid Interactive on My Aged Care
- Recent work with the Data Unit in the Office of Digital Government at the Department of Premier and Cabinet
I’m now a Technical Architect at Gaia and also Functional Lead for Software Engineering, and I enjoy coming to work every day with our broad range of work and interesting customers. I’ve kept an eye on developments in Taxonomy and Biodiversity Informatics over the years, and have worked with and continue to work with some fantastic colleagues over the years.
In that time we’ve put down proper roots in Australia (2 adults, 3 children, 1 dog, several plum trees, 100 odd gum trees and even an old rocking chair).
The flexibility that Gaia offers in terms of when and how we work makes having a family and community / social commitments much more comfortable than the old fashioned 9-5 jobs. On top of this, the satisfaction of working for a company that is trying to make the world a better place keep me coming back for more.
* Yes I know Java is still a widely used language, we just don’t use it at Gaia
Kehan