Meet Iris

Welcome to my readers and everyone else who's found their way to this page. I'm Iris, the woman behind deadSimpleTech, and this is where you can find out a bit more about me, both professionally and personally.

I was born in Kirikiriroa, New Zealand, to a Polish family, and I've lived either in Kirikiriroa or in Auckland for my entire life. I currently make my home in Kirikiriroa. I love the Waikato for its relatively no-nonsense attitude to life, the fact that it lets me be close to nature and the wonderful community (also cows). I love my other cities (Auckland and Wellington) for their excellent cultural scenes and just generally for being bigger cities with more to do.

I hold a Masters' degree in Engineering Science from the University of Auckland, during which I ran a comparative study between the Extended Finite Element Method and Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics for modelling brittle fracture in Polymethylmethacrylate. While I was studying that, I also published a paper on training various machine learning models to generate synthetic smart card data for Sydney's transit network that could be used for statistics and machine learning applications. I tried a Bayesian Network: the principle investigator took a deep learning approach, and I am pleased to say that my model absolutely thrashed his performance-wise.

Professionally, I spent much of my early career working in machine learning and data science, including work at LIC and Colmar Brunton (may they rest in peace). I then moved into data engineering, working in New Zealand's public sector for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. In 2024, I started deadSimpleTech and have been working on building this consultancy ever since, with my first clients being a US-based NGO working on trans issues and a UK-based startup in the finance space.

I've also maintained a consistent activist presence through all this time. I am a proud antifascist, and do my absolute best to live out my values in my everyday life. In the past I've worked on a number of issues including poverty and the arms trade, but most of my recent focus has been on transgender rights, especially in the workplace.

Technically, my current focus is mostly on technical infrastructure, especially in the data engineering space. I am an expert in the design and maintenance of data lakes and data warehouses, have a deep and broad knowledge of tools and approaches in the space and

In my spare time, I enjoy cooking, music (Handel, Mozart, Zelenka, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Nine Inch Nails, the Afro-Celt Sound System, St Vincent and Streetlight Manifesto are some of my favourite bands), reading, spending time in nature, homebrewing, wine, craft cocktails and PC gaming (Proton has made doing this last one on Linux somewhat easier). I also ride a 400cc Honda Shadow, which has been a learning project for much of the last year. Finally, I enjoy learning technical skills completely unrelated to what I do for work, mostly for fun.

Publications

International Workshop on Agent-Based Modelling of Urban Systems (ABMUS) Proceedings: 2022, Synthetic generation of individual transport data: the case of Smart Card data

Metro - 2019 Best Schools Edition (I'm a little grumpy about this one: I wrote the analysis notes and did most of the analysis, but wasn't credited. So it goes)

Geothermics, Volume 64, November 2016, pages 401 - 409, Numerical modelling of Pohutu Geyser, Rotorua, New Zealand (Published under my deadname)

Cloud infrastructure

Clouds are hell to work with. The interfaces are complex, messy and deeply unintuitive. Pricing structures are opaque, and it's easy to run up huge bills entirely by accident. Security is easy to get wrong, and the big players engage heavily in deceptive practices to make sure you make decisions in their interest, not yours. Worst of all, the biggest operators are US-based, and thus both morally and operationally suspect.

deadSimpleTech are experts in the uses of Infrastructure-as-Code tools for taming the cloud demons. We are familiar with a wide range of alternative cloud providers, and we know how to build cheap, robust cloud solutions that do what you need, don't break and don't break the bank.

Key technologies

Openstack, OVH, Hetzner, AWS, GCP, Azure (if I really must)

OpenTofu, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Packeto

Bash, Linux

Data engineering

So your cloud infrastructure's up and you're running things that rely on and generate data. You might even have grown enough that you need an analytics capability. While this overlaps with the cloud infrastructure niche to an extent, data engineering is very much its own field, and happily it's one that we can also support you with.

deadSimpleTech offers expert advice in the setup of data lakes and warehouses using the same Infrastructure as Code tooling we use in our cloud infrastructure. We can make sure that your data is secure, well-organised and that it provides you with the insights you need to make your business a success.

Key technologies

PostgreSQL, SQLite, Snowflake, Redshift

dbt, SQLMesh

Leadership and education

deadSimpleTech aren't just implementers. With a wealth of experience of many different kinds of engineering teams, and more recently experience of leading such teams, we are ideally placed to provide engineering leadership to your team. Whether you need a fractional engineering lead, a fractional architect or simply someone to bring your team up to speed on things like automated testing, CI/CD and the proper use of version control, we'll do our absolute best to make sure that your team is the best version of itself that it can be.

Key technologies

git, Github, Gitlab, Github Actions, Gitlab CI/CD

Miscellania

Outside of these areas, I am in general a fairly clever woman with quite a lot of experience packed into my nine years in the workforce. It's thus no surprise that I'm quite good at doing a whole bunch of things with computers. I am, for example, an excellent statistician and a pretty damned good web dev (as you can judge from this website). This means that I can contribute effectively to a whole family of projects in data science, data visualisation and website development.

I also have significant experience with high-performance computing code in C and C++, largely stemming from my academic experience in continuum mechanics and operations research. If you ever need to run an interesting fluid simulation or require support with fitting Bayesian models, I'm your gal!

Key technologies

Vue, Nuxt, HTML, CSS, Vanilla.js

Python, Flask, R

C, C++, Delphi (which I don't love working with, but if needs must...)