"People are often surprised to hear that I started out as a full-time house DJ in Sydney. At 19, I dropped out of an art education degree and picked up a job as a nightclub lighting operator, pressing buttons every Saturday night, watching the DJ do his thing. One day I just asked the DJ if he'd teach me... and he did. I'd spin the first hour or two while the club got warmed up and he would take over from there. I learned an awful lot about the psychology of reading a crowd of people and rotating the dance floor. That was fascinating stuff that showed me a lot about human behaviour and seeing how people operate en masse. It would later become my basis for understanding user experience—what people want and how to give it to them. One of my best memories from that period was headlining the retro room at a party in the Hordern Pavilion. It was on the night after Fatboy Slim had played there, so I had his turntable setup: a rotating DJ booth in the middle of the room. And as I'm in the middle of this sea of several thousand people, I led the entire room through the YMCA. It was awesome. 15 years on, I was getting older, but the patrons were not, so I retired from DJ-ing. In the mid-90's I taught myself basic design, HTML, and CSS with a friend's copy of Photoshop. That quickly saw me shift into design leadership and UX as the digital age started taking over, and that kicked me off into joining companies like Telstra, Atlassian, Auth0, and Deputy. Every time I moved from one thing to another I always stayed super curious and inquisitive. Always learning. I don't have a university degree, but I think you can learn everything you need with self-taught resources. I taught myself back-end programming using Google's Udacity platform several years ago. I've learned to just go in and do things until someone tells you that you can't (hint: they won't). I would encourage anyone else to just continue chasing their dreams and don't feel like you need to study too hard to be able to start doing something. Just go start doing it and you'll get there."
Remote Social is a consumer tech company, providing the ultimate destination for remote and hybrid teams to come together online to build connection and culture through play and shared experiences.