About
A Sydney developer who cares about the boring parts.
I'm Tishan David. I build developer tools, write about the Model Context Protocol, and self-host most of what I ship. If you want the commercial side — the book and my packages — that lives on my background & journey.
Timeline
Senior Platform Engineer / Tech Lead
Xero · Sydney, AU
Drove a multi-region failover strategy (ap-southeast-2 → ap-northeast-1), introduced an RFC process for platform changes, and lead a team of four. Authored and self-published the MCP Architecture Guide off the back of our internal implementation, and consult for a few Sydney startups on containerisation and deploy-pipeline design.
Senior Software Engineer
Xero · Sydney, AU
Led the platform modernisation: migrated the legacy frontend to Angular and rebuilt the backend as modular NestJS services with clear auth/billing/analytics boundaries. Owned the containerisation strategy and git-push pipeline that cut deploy time from ~20 min to under 3, rolled out an OpenTelemetry/Grafana observability stack, and introduced MCP tooling for internal AI workflows. Published OSS dev utilities (ts-cli-scaffold, config-validator) that crossed 1.4k+ GitHub stars, and spoke at a Sydney tech meetup on “Git-Push CI/CD in Practice”.
Software Engineer → Mid-Level
Afterpay · Sydney, AU
Shipped 6+ client-facing products end-to-end and took on my first real production infra: containerised apps, automated deploys, and Sentry/Datadog monitoring. Cut API p95 latency by 42% through query optimisation and Redis caching, mentored two juniors, and introduced PR templates and linting standards.
Junior Software Engineer
Canva · Sydney, AU
Migrated legacy jQuery/PHP modules to a modern TypeScript stack and built an internal dashboard used by 40+ ops staff. First taste of owning infrastructure — basic GitHub Actions CI and CloudWatch logging on EC2/RDS.
BSc Computer Science
University of Technology Sydney (UTS) · Sydney, AU
Graduated with a focus on developer productivity. Started contributing to open source (ts-config-boilerplate, node-heap-dump-analyzer) and gave my first meetup talk to the Sydney JS community.
Skills
Languages
Frameworks
Infra & CI/CD
Data
Observability
AI & tooling
Sydney, Australia
Based in Sydney — I work in AEST/AEDT, which matters more than people expect when your collaborators and CI runners live in other timezones.
Active in the local dev community: my first talk was to Sydney JS, and more recently I spoke on “Git-Push CI/CD in Practice” at a Sydney tech meetup.
I also consult for a handful of Sydney startups on containerisation and deploy-pipeline design — the same git-push approach that runs these sites.