PORTFOLIO

Eric

Sometimes, works under Personasoft

about-me.md

I've been taking things apart and putting them back together for as long as I've had a screwdriver or a terminal within reach. Whenever something impresses me, my very next thoughts are "What's next?", "What if?" and "Why can't we?", and given half a chance, I'm reaching for the spanner to see what's under the hood.

For years, my career took me somewhere else. I trained as a pharmacist at the University of Otago and built a stable, well-paid career in healthcare, finishing as a Lead Pharmacist whose team served 40+ aged-care and special-care facilities. It's important work, and deeply rewarding for the right person. For me, it was a stark clash with who I am. I'd invested years of study, thousands of dollars and a stack of professional exams.

So I chose a profession built around the one thing that has followed me my whole life: change.

I'm now completing a Master of Professional Business Analysis at Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington). BAs are the agents of change, and the space I love most sits between the business and the technical teams: understanding what people actually need, modelling where things are and where they could go, and explaining it clearly enough for everyone to act on. I'm especially drawn to health and the public sector, where decisions land on real people.

Pharmacy taught me how to sit across from someone on the worst day of their life and explain something complex in a way they can understand. It taught me to listen, to ask the right questions. I'll always be grateful for that.

Outside the degree, I'm usually building something in my homelab or singing with my band. Until June 2026, I was also a Lead Mentor at Tūhura Tech, teaching rangatahi how to break and build technology.

I've been called an idiot for throwing away a decade of hard work. I'm taking every year of it with me.

And I'm stubborn enough to keep asking "What's next?"

journey.exe

Early years

Childhood

Auckland

Growing up in Auckland, I wanted to know how everything worked, and the fastest way to find out was to open it up.

It started with the family computer. Then came old dollar-shop electronics that I took apart to see what was inside, and my beloved 2011 Symbian Nokia, loaded with any software I could get my hands on. Most of it was well beyond my understanding when I started poking at it, which got me into a fair amount of trouble.

Somewhere between the numerous error messages I formed a habit.

2013 – 2017

High School

Auckland

High school was Rangitoto College on Auckland's North Shore, one of the biggest schools in the country.

At home, the tinkering carried on: more gadgets opened up, more software installed, more questions asked. At school, I put my head down and started working toward something stable: a career in healthcare. The subjects, the exams, the grades. Looking back, this is where the decade of hard work people like to remind me about really began.

By the end of Year 13, the plan was set. I was heading south to the University of Otago to study health sciences, and my curiosity came along for the ride, filed under "hobby" for the time being.

What I took with me: a plan, and the discipline to follow it.

2018 – 2021

Otago

Otago

Otago started me on a year of health sciences, followed by three years of pharmacy school learning how medicines work in the body.

The most important thing I learnt in Dunedin happened outside the lecture theatre. From February 2019 to February 2020, I volunteered as a Peer Supporter with Life Matters Suicide Prevention Trust. Mental health has always been close to my heart, and this was my chance to show up for it. I learnt how to hold hard, sensitive conversations: to listen fully, stay open, and let the other person lead. It was empathy in practice, and it was life-changing.

I finished my Bachelor of Pharmacy in 2021, awarded with Distinction, and I left understanding both halves of the job: the medicine, and the person on the other side of the counter. Then I packed my bags again, this time for Christchurch.

What I took with me: empathy, and the patience to listen before I answer.

Nov 2021 – Feb 2023

Full registration as a New Zealand pharmacist

Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland

In November 2021, I started my intern year at Remedy Pharmacy Riccarton in Christchurch. It was my first job in a genuinely high-risk profession, where a single mistake could spell devastation for a patient, and it was perhaps the hardest year of my life.

The pressure was constant. Alongside dispensing, counselling patients and learning the day-to-day running of a community pharmacy, I was working through the training and professional exams needed to register. There was sweat, there were tears, and there was a lot of pure resilience. By the end of 2022, I'd earned my full registration.

Then came my first time standing on my own. From December 2022, I was the only outpatient dispensary pharmacist at Southern Cross North Harbour Hospital on Auckland's North Shore, working for Pharmacy Care Group. For the first time, I had full authority over a dispensary, and every final check was mine to make. It taught me to be organised, clear-headed and independent.

It also taught me when to reach out. I was the only person in the building legally allowed to authorise a dispensing, and I was still surrounded by expertise: hospital staff, technicians and business managers who each brought knowledge and experience I could lean on. Being on my own gave me independence. Asking for help made my decisions better.

What I took with me: resilience under pressure, and the confidence to ask for help.

Feb 2023 – Apr 2025

Leading and Leaving

Wellington

n February 2023, I moved to the Wellington region to become Lead Pharmacist at Unichem High Street Pharmacy in Lower Hutt, a specialised rest-home pharmacy serving 40+ aged-care and special-care facilities from Levin to Miramar. I was responsible for the work of 10+ experienced technicians and pharmacists, for keeping our workflow efficient, and for making sure we delivered on our contracts. Alongside automated adherence packing and traditional dispensing, the role covered vaccinations, chart reviews and clinical presentations.

It was chaotic, high-pressure and often understaffed. Every skill I'd built so far (empathy, organisation, communication, resilience) was tested to its limits as I balanced contractual obligations against competing clinical priorities. There was burnout. There were tears. There were also lessons I'll be grateful for forever.

This was also where I led my first workflow improvement project. Handover notes and accountability kept slipping through the gaps between staff, so I planned, tested and implemented a new digital workflow for our technicians. It met its technical requirements, and then adoption stalled. That was my first experience of a change failing to land, and it taught me that a change succeeds or fails with the people living it. Adoption needs its own plan from day one. I'm glad I ran it anyway.

Eventually, I had to be honest with myself. The work mattered, and it was a stark clash with who I am. In April 2025, I stepped away from pharmacy. Looking back, that stalled change project was a signpost pointing to what came next.

What I took with me: leadership under pressure, and my first hard lesson in change adoption.

Apr 2025 – Present

NOW: Lead Mentor, Tūhura Tech → Master's candidate

Wellington

Stepping away from pharmacy sent me back to the kid with the screwdriver.

In August 2025, I joined Tūhura Tech as a Lead Mentor. Tūhura was a Wellington non-profit improving digital technology education for school-aged kids and teens through Montessori-inspired learning. I designed and ran workshops for groups of 10+ rangatahi covering Python, Scratch, web development, cryptography, game development in Godot, CAD and 3D printing, and electronics fundamentals like logic gates. I built my own teaching tools along the way: a password-strength checker and live password-cracking demos for careers expos, a Fibonacci-keyed cipher that led students to a hidden URL, and Circudle, a logic-gate deduction game. It was everything I'd done for fun growing up, and the hours flew. Kids can be hard to manage and some concepts are hard to explain, so I learnt the craft of teaching too: knowledge becomes useful the moment someone else can pick it up and use it.

In February 2026, I started my Master of Professional Business Analysis at Te Herenga Waka. Business analysis made sense of everything before it: a whole profession built around change, sitting right between people and technology. I'm studying requirements, enterprise architecture with TOGAF and ArchiMate, design thinking, IT project management, and data modelling with SQL. One highlight so far was facilitating a full design-thinking sprint that became Nox, a data-consent prototype with granular consent sliders, a data-history tab and AI-summarised terms and conditions.

Outside class, I'm still taking things apart. I run Persona, my own self-hosted platform, from my homelab. I write free guides on enterprise architecture, Python and databases for my Knowledge Hub, some of which started as study notes for classmates, because knowledge should be free and shared. I also built a PostgreSQL database for my Pokémon card collection, which is far harder to model than it sounds.

In June 2026, systemic funding problems closed Tūhura Tech. Its wiki lives on as a read-only archive in my Knowledge Hub, and if Tūhura ever returns, I'm there in a heartbeat. A month later, I was helping organise the 10th anniversary of Wellington's BA Career Meetup, surrounded by the community I'm training to join.

What's next? Finishing my Master's in 2027 and stepping into the space between business and technology, ideally in health or the public sector, where decisions land on real people. After that, I'll be asking the question again.