BrookeOehm Smith

Brooke
Oehm Smith

engineer, since 1993

33years shipping

  • Taught a 32-bit i386 application to live on 64-bit ARM, inside Docker
  • Fine-tuned DistilGPT-2 on a decade of my own journals
  • Shipped publishing systems for the F-111, the Orion, AEW&C and the Hornets
  • Counted 2,947 useSelector call sites to settle an architecture argument
  • Wrote an honours thesis on personalised documents — in 1995
  • Two hundred posts of climate writing out of Brisbane, 2006 to 2012
  • Found a suite of unit tests that CI had never once run
  • Introduced TDD at a defence contractor, one pilot project at a time
  • Built a choose-your-own-adventure storyteller for kids, powered by an LLM
  • Still solving Sudoku — first in Java, now in React
  • Ran IT and comms for Friends of the Earth, and organised the protests
  • Tae Kwon Do, guitar, skiing, and a persistent weakness for live bands
  • Wrote production Omnimark, a markup language you have almost certainly never met
  • Shipped legal reference works on CD-ROM, back when that was the future
  • Built expert systems that classified aircraft faults from FMECA data
  • Briefed a cyber security team on what LLM-driven attackers can now do
  • Won an ACT Government tender, then replaced the spreadsheet it was about
  • Chaired Boeing Australia's Environment Committee
  • Named a tool goc, because plain go was already a programming language
  • Checks every bill adds up, which has caught three real billing errors
  • Turns one essay into six versions, from a child's edition to an academic one
  • Wrote Macintosh software for Defence in 1994, in C++ and FoxPro
  • Runs a fleet of document processors that all report into one dashboard
  • Published a four-part method for making AI write code you can maintain

Read the resume More about me

The Swedish Chef, standing in for a photograph of me

Full stack engineer across Defence, government, science and enterprise. Still curious enough to fine-tune a language model on my own journals.

Two strands

The engineering

Thirty-three years of it. Publishing systems for RAAF aircraft at Boeing, claims and policy systems at IAG, science platforms at CSIRO, and most recently a ten-app micro-frontend portal at CASA. Lately: retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuned language models, and a methodology for making AI write code you can actually maintain.

The full resume

The other thing

Six years of climate writing out of Brisbane, IT and comms for Friends of the Earth, and a stack of protests organised in a period when almost nobody was listening. It didn't work. It was still worth doing, and the archive is still there.

How the two fit together