About Me

Principal Software Engineer and long-time independent app developer

Hi I’m Christian Inkster, an experienced software developer and father of two based in Perth, Western Australia.

This blog is where I write through projects, experiments, and technical frustrations. I don’t update it often, it probably averages out to once every 2 years with some occasional 10 year gaps 😂.

Career

I’m currently a Principal Software Engineer at Soracom, where I lead engineering work on data platform products for large-scale IoT systems. Before that, I spent years as an independent developer designing, building, and shipping native apps used by millions of people.

My extensive experience as both an engineering lead and a business owner means I try to focus on building what is important. I believe as businesses use AI/LLMs to move rapidly, sometimes in the wrong direction that this mindset is essential. Where product decisions and engineering knowledge overlap I consider myself strongest with native apps, backend systems, data visualization, developer tooling, and the infrastructure that keeps software fast and reliable.

Summary

  • 20+ years as a professional software developer
  • 8+ years leading engineering work on IoT platform products
  • Team leadership experience across frontend, backend, and full-stack engineers
  • Deep native iOS and macOS experience with Objective-C, Swift, and Apple platform APIs
  • Backend experience with Go, Node.js, Python, AWS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL datastores, Docker, and Kubernetes
  • Frontend experience with TypeScript, React, Redux, Angular, and Grafana plugin development
  • Experience building secure, schema-aware AI/LLM data tools for multi-tenant Snowflake environments
  • Practical focus on performance, observability, reliability, and customer-facing delivery

Experience

Soracom Inc.

Tokyo, Japan / Remote

Principal Software Engineer
March 2022 - Present

Data Platform Team Lead
April 2025 - Present

  • Lead cross-functional engineering teams across frontend, application, and platform development.
  • Built horizontally scalable backend systems in Go and AWS for real-time IoT data processing.
  • Architected and delivered Grafana-based IoT data visualization platforms serving large-scale device deployments.
  • Developed a full schema-aware harness for secure LLM-assisted querying of multi-tenant Snowflake data warehouses, including SQL generation, validation, history, favorites, and workflow-focused UX.
  • Identified recurring customer reporting needs and built custom reporting foundations for reusable snapshots, shareable links, cached results, and recurring analysis workflows.
  • Improved mission-critical alerting reliability through redundant architecture and stronger monitoring.
  • Reduced average console load times from over fifteen seconds to under four seconds through performance optimization and deployment improvements.
  • Built high-performance Grafana backend datasources and plugins.
  • Improved caching performance with custom Cloudflare Workers, increasing cache hit rate to 95%.
  • Created real-time snapshot and public dashboard sharing capabilities for IoT data visualization.
  • Mentored engineers and led technical knowledge-sharing sessions across teams.

Senior Software Engineer
March 2018 - March 2022

Team Lead
September 2021 - March 2022

  • Upgraded and modernized Soracom’s user console from a legacy Angular architecture.
  • Led frontend development work on responsive design and user experience improvements.
  • Built SSO support for multi-user authentication across the Soracom platform.
  • Implemented security enhancements including rate limiting, OTP services, and access controls.
  • Developed API gateway CORS wildcard support for dynamic subdomain access.
  • Created logging and monitoring systems using DataDog and custom metrics.
  • Delivered customer-facing features including plot panels for IoT device mapping and data visualization.

HUSoft LLC

Perth, Australia / Tokyo, Japan

Founder and Lead Developer
2008 - Present

Personally designed, developed, and shipped multiple App Store-featured apps.

EasyBeats
An iOS drum machine and long-running independent app business. Built a non-blocking, low-latency audio sequencer in C for early iOS devices, with a focus on touch-first interaction and reliable realtime audio.

LockIn
A cross-platform messaging and scheduling app with calendar integration. Built a horizontally scalable backend in Go on Google App Engine with a NoSQL datastore, a native iOS client, and AngularJS-based Android, web, and desktop versions with a shared codebase.

Guitar Chord Pro
A guitar app using low-level audio APIs to switch between thousands of chords with minimal latency. Featured by Apple worldwide on launch.

MapMap
A location sharing app built with React Native and TypeScript, sharing most code across iOS and Android. Built a Go backend on Google App Engine with Firebase realtime database integration.

LoKey
A live location sharing app acquired by Secure2go in 2016. Built with Swift, Go, WebSockets, and realtime Google Maps integration.

Millstream Web Software

Western Australia

Senior Web Developer
2004 - 2008

  • Led development of a CMS and ecommerce SaaS product using a LAMP stack, XML, and XSLT.
  • Consolidated the codebase into Git repositories and improved deployment processes.
  • Built automatic caching and deployment to Amazon CloudFront for better international performance.
  • Helped bring in corporate, government, and education sector clients.

Haymarket Print and Web Services

Western Australia

Web Developer
2001 - 2004

  • Developed government and school websites using PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS.
  • Created deployment and server management automation scripts.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science
Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia
1997 - 2000

Contact

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