I'm Blake Waldron. I live in Melbourne, where I help build the internet.
I've loved making things for as long as I can remember, and wrote my first program when I was 14 years old, when I discovered you could mod a computer game called Skyrim.
From my passion of video games and computers came a fondness of art and design, leading me to learn as much as I about conceptual art, game design and games programming. In my first year of Monash University, a friend and mentor advised I take up C++ and Java for the sake of game development. I now know that he was actually hoping for me to take more of an interest in programming. He shortly after asked me to be his Co-Founder at a little US based startup called Secret Travel. A startup that saw more than 100,000 users in its first 6 months of life.
This lead me to working as a freelance web developer whilst studying Computer Science. After doing a few websites alone, I connected with a few creatives and I co-founded and co-directed a boutique digital agency in Melbourne, Fitzroy called Tekni Creative. This agency did many things, but it's technical output was all JAMstack - before it was even cool. We worked with some amazing clients including Lamborghini, Mont Blanc, and Verbatim to name a few. It was during this time where I built Nibblit, a food discovery Mobile Application which during its first month was ranked #22 for Food and Lifestyle on the Apple Appstore.
Today, I am Head of Engineering at a company called Convert Digital. I've taken a local team of 4 developers and scaled it to over 80 developers worldwide, and spearheaded an entire new technical offering in that company with what I learned during my time at Tekni Creative, which is now called "Headless Commerce" - all in the space of 4 years.