I started my career in the Electronics field, with a passion for designing and building gadgets (electronic things). In the early 70s I worked for a telecoms company and, while working with early generation microcontrollers, had a light bulb moment when it dawned on me that a piece of electronic hardware that I developed for a very specific function could be re-tasked in software to do something completely different. Back then I used to design and prototype the electronics on breadboard, write software in assembler, layout a circuit board with tape, etch the board etc, etc. While electronic design was a lot of fun, it was a slow process whereas re-tasking software was much faster. A few years later I changed career and went to designing, deploying and maintaining electronic instruments such as Weather stations and other environmental monitoring systems. In 2001 I launched Brush Electronics to sell the software drivers I had originally developed for my own projects and to offer consulting services.

Eventually I went to work for a major networking company and moved to the USA. I spent a lot of time working with public cloud providers but never lost my passion for designing things that communicated with other things. While in the USA, I became close friends with Scott Waller from Bellevue WA USA. Scott was a former volunteer fire fighter and an active ski rescue volunteer. He also shared the same passions as I did for developing things and together, we investigated this new radio technology, LoRaWAN, to see how we could utilize this technology for locating children, ski rescue equipment on ski fields and for other applications.