Art > Code

tjmb — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:20:10 +0000

I've been playing music longer than I've been thinking about business, about 10 years longer. But at some point I noticed I was the one in the room who actually wanted to figure out how things worked: how a gig got booked, how money moved, how you built something sustainable around an art form that resists sustainability. So I leaned into that.

I started SWASH, a live music booking agency in Brisbane, Australia. Strategy and operations were the job: artist relationships, venue pipelines, contracts, logistics. What drew me to it was the self-ownership. Organising and producing events, building something real inside an industry I loved. We started as bookies in one venue in 2016 and grew exponentially; by 2020 we had our hands in most live music venues in Brisbane, producing over 400 events in 2019 alone.

Somewhere in there I'd figured it out. The challenge was solved. I knew how this worked, and knowing how something works is about the time I stop finding it interesting. I'd become a middleman in something I used to care about deeply, and that gap between used to and used to is hard to ignore.

Then I had to make a website. And I found this software thing.

One of the smartest people I know is a Software Engineer.
I wanted to understand what they understood. I went through 100Devs, a full-stack bootcamp, and then fell down every rabbit hole I could find.
One thing kept leading to the next. I eventually got a client and I realised I had real value to offer, which prompted me to start Denim Tech, a web dev agency based in Melbourne. Client work, side projects, and the ongoing rigamarole of figuring out how to run a one-person shop without losing my mind.

Day to day that means contract work for marketing agencies, bespoke builds for clients, and a lot of self-directed study.
Right now I'm deep in ML. Working through MIT OpenCourseWare and reading Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn. The ideas keep arriving faster than I can build them, which is either a good problem or a maddening one depending on the day.

I'm writing here to think out loud. About the craft, about contract work, about what it looks like when a systems-brained musician-turned-operator decides software is the next interesting problem.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

DEV Community: tjmb

Art > Code