About Me

I’ve always been the sort of person who needs to know how things work, and then promptly tries to do something with that knowledge.

Learning by making

A big part of that attitude comes from my Dad. He built the family car of my childhood, an EH Holden sedan The EH Holden was a mid-1960s Australian family car produced by General Motors-Holden between 1963 and 1965. Available as a sedan, station wagon, and utility, it featured clean, modern styling for its day, a choice of six-cylinder engines, and a reputation for toughness and straightforward mechanicals. It was a common sight on Australian roads and a popular base for backyard rebuilds and custom projects precisely because parts were plentiful and the design was robust and uncomplicated. Wikipedia, from a shell he found at the dump. Watching him make things, and helping him make the things I wanted, quietly taught me that it’s okay to just try.

Of course LEGO played a part. Official kits first, then the far more important phase of ignoring the instructions and inventing increasingly improbable creations. A Dick Smith Electronics kit at seven and a chemistry set a little later only made things worse (or better, depending on your perspective). School and local libraries kept the fire going; I treated the borrowing limit as a personal challenge and routinely read deep into the evening.

As a young teen I was lucky enough to be mentored in electronics (and a healthy dose of engineering and making) by an awesome Egyptian who had moved to my hometown named Frank.

The Amiga years

Computers arrived next. The first was an Amstrad CPC6128 from my parents, but the real love affair began with the Amiga The Amiga became beloved because it delivered genuine technical magic in the mid-to-late 1980s that no other affordable home computer could match: advanced colour graphics, hardware-accelerated effects, four-channel stereo sound, and true multitasking. It felt less like a games machine or beige office box and more like a creative workstation that invited people to make demos, music, video and art. Its open, hackable design encouraged tinkering, while a passionate community and legendary demo scene turned ownership into membership of a clever, slightly obsessive club, which is why so many still speak of it with lasting affection. Wikipedia. I saved paperboy earnings for an A500, then cheerfully hacked the CPC’s monitor into service as a display and coaxed an old Acorn 5¼-inch floppy drive into working with it too.

Halfway through Year 9 I also spent six months at TAFE Technical and further education or simply TAFE is the common name in Australia for vocational education. Wikipedia completing a Certificate of Occupational Studies in Engineering covering electronics, technical drawing, CAD, welding, and fitting and turning. Those are the subjects I can recall anyway.

Later came an A1200 and a custom PC tower I built to house it. I eked every last scrap of performance out of AmigaOS, contributed to Aminet, beta-tested Directory Opus and AmIRC, and somehow ended up still beta-testing AmigaOS to this day. In the early ’90s I even negotiated with Mirabilis and gathered over 26,000 petition signatures trying to get an official Amiga port of ICQ. It didn’t happen, but the effort was fun and I was interviewed by UK’s Amiga Format magazine about it.

The web becomes home

That same curiosity made the early internet feel like the ultimate playground, and the web became home for a long stretch. I started on the helpdesk at a regional ISP, became their first web developer when I sold a webpage to a local Mag wheel retailer⊕ They made their money back on the first sale!, building sites for several large Australian companies. In those early days you’d sometimes find me sitting on the primary server, running Mosaic/Netscape under X11, being the first to post animated GIFs into webchat and cheerfully blowing people’s minds. Along the way I architected RMIT’s online Masters in Business Innovation It earned an Xplor International award for innovation in education in 1997. and, because the early web was a gloriously strange place, also looked after the website for Cadbury Freddo Frog Yes, the chocolate frog has a Wikipedia page.

I moved to Melbourne just before taking the role of Web Architect at the largest K-12 school in the southern hemisphere, where I built a custom CMS in ColdFusion ColdFusion Markup Language, the tag-based language behind a lot of early dynamic websites. Wikipedia and created an Intranet for staff and students that parents could also log into. While there I took my first overseas trip (Greece), learned to scuba dive, and later found myself underwater in Fiji and Vanuatu. Around 2004 I spent time in Africa on an immersive drumming and dance program. In the years that followed I did a fair bit of urban exploration around Melbourne and travelled widely through Asia.

Realityloop and Drupal

I started Realityloop in 2005 realityloop.com moonlighting after hours, originally building small sites in ColdFusion. As my experience grew I switched to Drupal Drupal is an open-source content management system that has powered a significant portion of the web since the early 2000s. Known for its flexibility and robustness, it lets developers and site builders create everything from simple blogs to complex, high-traffic enterprise and government platforms. Its strength lies in a modular architecture, a large ecosystem of contributed modules, and a strong emphasis on structured content, security, and scalability. drupal.org, drawn by the simple fact that it was open source. After quitting my job at the time I took Realityloop full-time in 2011 becoming a very well respected Drupal services business. Realityloop ceased active trading mid-2026.

Within the Drupal community I served as Community Lead of Drupal Melbourne from 2009 to 2019. I also became known for improving the global mentoring experience, improving setup of local tooling at conferences and running conference-based first-time sprinter workshops that trained more than 4,000 contributors. I’ve co-maintained over 50 contributed modules and contributed patches to hundreds of projects. My first core contributions came in Drupal 7; I also worked on code that ran on drupal.org and groups.drupal.org, ranked among the top 11% of contributors to Drupal 8 core, and continued contributing to core through at least Drupal 9 and 10. I attended 14 DrupalCons across the US, Europe and Australia for the better part of a decade.

Hardware detours

I dabbled in hardware too. The Zesty Nimble Watch it in action; it’s embedded below as well. was, at the time, the smallest and lightest 3D-printer extruder in the world. In 2017 I spent time in Shenzhen touring factories and the hardware startup scene. I also ran a Tesla accessories venture. Both ventures eventually closed, which is a polite way of saying the universe had other ideas COVID basically., but I learnt a lot from them both.

Now

These days my urge to understand and create is channeled via Konstruukt Labs konstruukt.com. It’s just me, no team. It’s my current vehicle for whatever I’m doing, and I’m excited about the things taking shape there.

I also run a YouTube channel, It’s VRK youtube.com/ItsVRK, where I dig into mixed reality, VR gaming, motion simulators, and the practical (sometimes messy) side of making the hardware actually work.

If any of this resonates, or you’re just curious what I’m building, I’d love to hear from you.