When I'm outside
I've spent a fairly unreasonable amount of my life outdoors. Running mountain races, wandering through the Australian backcountry, travelling around New Zealand in a campervan, hiking in Europe and Asia, ski touring, cycling, and generally finding excuses to go somewhere with a lot of elevation.
Over the years, I've been lucky enough to explore some incredible places. From the mountains of Corsica and the rainforests of Malaysia to the Blue Mountains, remote parts of Tasmania and plenty of places in between. Some of my favourite memories are from solo trips, travelling with little more than a camera, running shoes and whatever food I could find along the way.
I love heading into the mountains on my own, sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time. But I enjoy the social side of the outdoors just as much. Taking a group of strangers on their first hike or their 500th. Heading off-track with friends just to see what's out there, or going for an easy walk from Bondi to Coogee. Volunteering at race aid stations, crewing mates through their races, or answering someone's question on Reddit about which hiking shoes to buy.
To me, it's all part of the same thing. You don't need to do anything particularly difficult or impressive to enjoy being outdoors.
And that's really where Hikezilla comes from. It started in 2020 with a few people getting together for hikes around Sydney. Six years later, that's still the heart of it, no matter how much everything else has grown.
Mountains, trails, people and questionable route choices.
Product, data, technology and figuring out how things work.
When I'm not outside
When I'm not outdoors, I spend most of my time working in tech. My background is a bit of a mix of advertising, analytics, software and building products. I've worked in solutions engineering, technical account management and operations, and helped build an ecommerce business along the way.
I've always enjoyed being somewhere between the technical and non-technical sides of things. I like working with data, writing SQL, building integrations and automating things, but I also enjoy working with people, solving problems and figuring out whether something actually needs to be built in the first place.
Hikezilla is really where those two sides of my life come together. I started wondering whether some of the things I'd learned from working in tech, building products and seeing how open-source communities work could be useful in the outdoors. So I started experimenting, and one idea gradually turned into quite a few more.
Walking it once apparently wasn't enough.
