About

What on earth am I doing?

Hi, my name is Dennis O'Keeffe and I am trying to GTFO of the 9-5 rat race. I am not a huge fan of the workplace.

I am half-Australian, half-Samoan and I live in Australia with my Japanese girlfriend (whom I met through software engineering). We have one cheeky cat and both are very keen for both of us to live a balanced lifestyle.

Currently, we live in Melbourne but are heading off soon to get near the beach. Hopefully in a few years we can start travelling the world a bit more.

I am aiming for 12 projects in 12 months while working fulltime (crazy I know).

Background

This will get some loving soon, but here is the tl;dr:

  • I am a software engineer at Australian Payments Plus. We're a payment gateway for Australians. In my brain, I am committed to working here for at least three years (December 2026) at which time I hope that I am empowered to make a good financial decision on what I do for work (for what it's worth, I could still be working here if I enjoy it!).
  • I have been too much talk, not action when it comes to shipping my own products. I am working on changing that.
  • I have been writing a software blog since 2020, but the traction-to-time-spent ratio has been... less than ideal for the cost of living.

Projects

This website is designed to follow with any updates on projects going forward. Each day that I work, I will be updating the website (even if it's just a few short lines or a video).

For a full list of what I have done, check my personal website project list.

Interests

This is work-in-progress, but right now I am keen to solve some of my own problems:

  1. Company onboarding.
  2. Japanese study.
  3. Package management for multi-language repos.

These are all currently my own problems, but I am super keen to become more original and start solving other smaller problems.