G’day Sandy, let’s start with the question on everyone’s mind. Are you related to Inlight co-founder Tony, or is this one big coincidence?
Not that I am aware of but we haven’t had a chance to go through our family trees or taken a DNA test yet so we will have to see. I haven’t met that many Milnes outside my family or Scotland (where there are a lot) so I’m glad that they will be well represented at Inlight.
Looks like ancestry.com is going to get a work out. Moving on, how did you find out about us here at Inlight?
I think I was casually looking through LinkedIn or maybe Stack Overflow and an ad came up for a position at Inlight. It looked interesting so I decided to investigate.
Awesome! We’re glad the initial investigation has led to you joining the team!
You’re just getting started here at Inlight, but what is exciting you about the future?
I’m excited to get to know everyone at Inlight a little better and to get some more hands on experience with some front end libraries and frameworks. I’m also hoping the my reasonably broad skill set and experience will mean I can help out on projects in multiple ways.
Good stuff, we can’t wait to see what you’ll get your hands on in the coming months.
In the interest of some more ‘Who is Sandy Milne’ info… have you always lived in Melbourne?
I’ve lived in Melbourne my whole life but have been lucky enough to be able to travel overseas and spend some time adventuring around the world. My wife is originally from Yorkshire in the UK so I’ve spend a fair bit of time in old blighty visiting family and friends.
After I finished school I did a couple of years study doing psychology and computing but ended up deciding to take some time off study and got into music and DJing. That lead to doing a diploma of sound production at RMIT and then working as a sound engineer at a sound studio in Port Melbourne for about 7 years. While working there I started writing some sound related software for the studio and writing some iPhone apps in my spare time.
I ended up finishing my original computing degree studying part time while working full time at the studio and drinking lots of coffee and tea to stay up late and finish my assignments. I was enjoying coding way too much and wanted to really hone my skills so I decided it was time for a career change. I got a job at an awesome company in Melbourne called Yellowfin BI that make a web based analytics platform. I started as a mobile developer but then moved into working across, mobile, backend, frontend development and some devOps as well.
I’ve also worked on a couple of side projects over the years, including a children’s phonics program app, a collaboration with an artist and the City of Melbourne to build an app to discover stories around Melbourne and an app that provides a comprehensive collection of Australian slang with audio examples (I also channeled my inner bogan and provided the voice for the examples).