About me

Hi,

I'm Arun. I'm a software engineer based in Wellington, New Zealand 🇳🇿. I have two jobs. The best one is that along with my wife, I run Hang Five, a daily word game. During the day I work as a lead engineer on the Fixed assets team at Xero, a leading cloud accounting software company.

This site has been my blog since 2007. I've mostly written about dev problems I've encountered in my work and personal projects. In April 2023 I relaunched it as a newsletter focussing on dev tips, tricks and stories. My readership (it's 15 people) is actually more product-focussed. I'm planning to add multiple newsletters in time, so that people can subscribe to topics that interest them.

I've been programming since I was a kid in the 80s. We had an Amstrad CPC 464 and it had Logo on it. Then I got into copying BASIC code out of Usborne books. I dabbled in Pascal (mainly because I wanted a compiled language that would give me an EXE file) and tried C when I was about 11 and couldn't get my head around pointers. My skills really took off when I discovered Visual Basic 3.0 in high school. The main tools of my trade at the moment are .NET (both Framework and what was formerly known as Core) and TypeScript.