Software Engineering — University of Auckland
University of Auckland · 2011–2014
Four years learning how systems work, while discovering my real calling was running them -- not building them.
What I Learned
- Engineering teaches you to think in systems. That mental model stays even when you stop writing production code.
- The best way to do an engineering degree is to be doing real work at the same time. Theory lands differently when you have a live problem to test it against.
- The discipline of specifying a problem before you try to solve it is the most transferable thing the degree gave me.
- Being good at something and being passionate about it are different things. Finding that out early is a gift.
I did my Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Software Engineering at the University of Auckland between 2011 and 2014. I loved the logic of it -- the way you could reduce a messy problem to something precise and solvable. What I found, honestly, was that my passion for writing code itself was lacking. I was capable enough, but it wasn't the thing that lit me up.
What did light me up was running C5 Network at the same time. That's where I found my real calling -- working with people, building something, making decisions under uncertainty. The irony is I probably wouldn't have discovered any of that without an addiction to League of Legends. The game pulled me into a community, which pulled me into thinking about how communities and businesses actually work, which led directly to C5. A strange path, but not an accidental one.
The degree itself gave me a way of thinking I still use. Systems design. First principles reasoning. The discipline of specifying a problem before you try to solve it. I don't write production code in my day to day work, but the mental model hasn't left.
What I remember most -- apart from the $5 canteen lunches that most health inspectors would probably classify as a biohazard -- is how much the parallel tracks reinforced each other. A lecture on distributed systems hit differently when you were also trying to figure out why your actual system was falling over. The academic rigour gave language to things I was learning empirically, and the real work gave the academic material stakes.
My final year was the most formative of the lot. C5 Network had made it pretty clear by then that my future was in the business world, not behind a terminalAlthough with Claude Code, that's looking like where I'm heading back again. But that year also reminded me how much I loved working with genuinely new technology. My honours research project, Automate, was essentially us trying to do AI and ML before it was in everyone's lingo like it is in 2026. We were working at the edge of what was possible, which is a different feeling to applying established tools to known problems. That paper was eventually cited by a Google patent, which I only found out much later and still find quietly remarkable. It was a good reminder that you don't always know the impact of the work while you're doing it.
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