hey! you can call me tom, or pl4nty (/ˈplaːnti/). I’m a 20-something guy from Australia, living in Melbourne after spending time all over the country. I enjoy breaking and making all sorts of systems, especially software. I’m also fond of novels, nature, and opera (as well as art song).
if we happen to cross paths, I’m always down to grab coffee or say hi! I travel to Sydney pretty often, and some other places too:
- PECAN+ 2026 in Perth
- [un]prompted in Sydney
- BSides Canberra. I always try to attend, it was my first con!
- Possibly ECSC 2026 in Germany, or CyberCon 2026 in Melbourne otherwise
- BSides Perth 2026
- Japan in December
some communities I’m involved with
- organiser of PECAN+
- Emu Exploit capture-the-flag team, ICC/ECSC, and the aussie CTF scene in general
- the Australian National University, and its venerable CompSci Students’ Association
- National Youth Science Forum
- Workplace Ninjas Australia
open source
- my most popular project was an excuse to learn golang on a weekend 💀
- Talos Linux distro for k8s, particularly my RISC-V port. fully bootstrapped from 181 bytes of machine code. yes, it was painful
- Linux kernel and U-Boot, for those RISC-V boards
- k8s, OpenTelemetry, BuildKit, other misc CNCF projects
- anytime I find a simple bug. talk is cheap, send (good) patches
making
- keyboards, since 2019. mostly splits with gimmicks
- simple PCBs, like badgelife
micro🅱️oft
- Microsoft Intune and Windows from my work at Devicie
- Windows Package Manager (winget) contributor - CLI, packaging tooling, weird hacks, etc