a personal timeline of building things
The tidy version is a list of roles. This is closer to how it felt: launches, late nights, strange bugs, good people, a few sales — and the little moments that made ten years at Audience Republic feel real.
Not productivity. Just the changing pulse of a company being built.
The Audience Republic years come from an AI-assisted reading of ten years of my Slack history. This public edit keeps the character and removes private names, credentials, internal links and moments that belong to other people.
goCatch / the prologue
Product + engineering
At goCatch, the screen was only the surface. Underneath were live location, dispatch, payments, driver supply and all the sharp edges that appear when a person is waiting on a kerb.
Street-level software. City-scale systems.
Real worldPeople, cars and money moving at once
Hard partMaking live location feel dependable
The Medic / built + sold
Founder + builder
The Medic gave people a direct path from feeling sick to speaking with a GP and receiving a medical certificate. I built it, took it to market and sold it to 1st Group.
Small enough to ship. Real enough to matter.
The productA GP consultation without the waiting room
The outcomeBuilt, launched and acquired by 1st Group
Ticketsquad.io / the origin
Co-founder, day one
The first message landed on 11 February. The company was called Ticketsquad.io, there were two people online, an early client to help and the first version of an audience data model to make real.
The whole thing was two people with a big idea.
First message11 February 2016 — the workspace wakes up
First clientA real event and no room for pretend software
First schemaThe audience data model starts taking shape
the rename / first platform
Builder-in-chief
The new name went live with the customary launch-day DNS drama. I was still writing the Clojure, managing design and front-end contractors, and finding out exactly how much Christmas Day a founder can reasonably take off.
It’s quite possible I screwed something up while I was hacking on it in the bush.
Milestoneaudiencerepublic.com goes live
Classic JasonAt least I took most of Christmas Day off
The thesisAudience intelligence from every useful signal
process / integrations / automation
Hands-on builder
QA, sprints, payment flows, messaging integrations, security processes and the first internal automations arrived. The scrappy thing was becoming a platform — and a company that could operate it.
Yay sales bot! Give that guy a raise!
Tech winThe first automation works in production
Ops momentA staging URL meets the whole company
Growing upThe first real security processes arrive
Eventbrite / payments / WSS
The double life
Audience Republic expanded through ticketing integrations and a growing engineering team. Outside the office I won two WSS bachata categories and medalled in another — the other half of a life that work Slack mostly never saw.
A startup, a white panel van, and two championship wins in the same year.
Personal winTwo WSS bachata categories
Still on callEvent syncs do not observe championship week
Private archiveDance memories saved in notes to self
pandemic / reliability / scale
Pandemic builder
COVID emptied calendars, but the platform and team continued to grow: hundreds of thousands of email sends, better monitoring and two people online testing deployments while Sydney stayed home.
It’s just you and me online — it’s a pretty quiet New Year’s.
The contextAn events company in a world without events
Scale704,000+ email sends monitored in real time
NYEA very small deployment party
infrastructure / teaching chapter
Infrastructure + endings
AWS networking and distributed systems got deeper — the kind of debugging that ends with tcpdump after midnight. My regular dance-teaching chapter also closed at the old Tropical Soul studio.
Such a fun last week of classes… end of an era.
Late nightsUDP multicast debugging after midnight
Classic JasonRunning on empty; need a coffee
PersonalThe regular teaching chapter closes
scale / delegation / still debugging
Scaling the organisation
Engineering needed structure that did not depend on me doing every kind of work. We hired dedicated management, deepened the technical partnerships and — inevitably — broke Emacs after a Homebrew update.
After running brew update I’ve now broken Emacs.
DelegationThe first dedicated engineering manager search
Holiday modeDocker and Postgres debugging on 30 December
UnresolvedStuck outside my apartment — long story
integrations / incidents / culture
Code + culture builder
More ticketing integrations, squad leaders and the occasional 2:30am incident. I was still in the code, but more of the job became teaching through failures, recognising people directly and making the team safer to operate in.
2:30am is not a fun time to be looking into this.
The long view25+ continuous years of professional coding
IncidentOnline when it matters
LeadershipChecking the people, not only the output
performance / candour / principles
The honest year
Too much of the year disappeared into making legacy code perform. Over Christmas in New Zealand I wrote down the honest version. That reflection became clearer engineering principles and a reset for what came next.
I’ve spent a lot of 2024 just refactoring code — actually exhausting and depressing for me.
PerspectiveA strategic reset written from New Zealand
CodifiedEngineering design principles become explicit
Rare candourSaying out loud what the work was costing
AI adoption / AM3 / codification
Culture codifier + early adopter
I tried Claude Code and multi-model review on my own work first, kept the examples that genuinely helped, then brought the useful parts to the team. Audience Manager 3 shipped after years of architectural decisions.
Try it privately. Keep what works. Make the useful part normal.
AI adoptionPersonal experiment before team standard
MilestoneAudience Manager 3 finally ships
OnboardingPrinciples from day one for every new hire
architecture / sale / next things
Architect, delegator, still in the code
The title shifted toward architecture, the tools became standard and Audience Republic was eventually sold. I still wanted the foundational work nobody notices — and a current folder full of Neuma, Lullafi and a gig agent for my sister.
397GB of dead indexes dropped. Invisible work; very visible relief.
Tech winFour tables lose 397GB of dead weight
Team standardAI-assisted engineering becomes normal
What nextNeuma, Lullafi and useful personal agents
the bit that survived every era
Titles changed. Scale changed. The useful instinct did not: understand the real problem, make the complicated part feel simple, and keep enough of your hands on the machinery to know when the abstraction is lying.