# Software engineer at Alphero, in Wellington.

I’m Hamish. I build software, and most of what’s on this site started with me wanting to find out how something worked, then building it on my own time. A lot of it comes back to the same two questions, who is allowed to reach a system, and what it does when part of it goes away.

I work at Alphero as a software engineer. The projects here are things I’ve built outside that job. They look scattered, though most of them come back to the same thing, a system somebody else can reach, and what it does when a part of it fails.

![Hamish Burke in Wellington](/_astro/headshot.Ctt5ZwgL_ZxSDMX.webp?dpl=6ae887ed8e25a3eebeea65f9)

## Taking the SaaS layer out of You Inc

I built the accounts, plans and billing around You Inc, then took them all back out again. Running a finance service meant holding other people’s bank credentials. A tool people run themselves on their own machine made more sense.

[The You Inc story](/work/you-inc)

## Running a server at home

Running a server at home, and a GPU a few of us share, keeps handing me questions I don’t get from work: how you recover a machine, who can reach it from outside, and what happens when it switches off one day.

[Testing a full recovery](/work/home-lab)

Background

## A master’s, then a job.

I did a Master of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where my thesis was on diffusion-based anomaly detection for electrical distribution networks (spotting faults in the power grid from the data it throws off, using the same family of models as image generation). I got plenty of interesting results, though very few that were actually useful.

Outside software I’m trying to get better at the piano, and to spend more of the week away from a screen than I currently manage.

[View CV ](/cv)[What I’ve built ](/work)[GitHub ](https://github.com/Slaymish)[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamishburke)