About Me

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0800

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

Email: christian@hopefullydontuseful.com
GitHub: cinkster
Blog: Hopefully Useful

Pages on Hopefully Useful