Jack Skinner

G'day

I'm an independent tech consultant based in Sydney, Australia

I build world-class teams delivering great products for their customers. Think of me as your CTO for hire.

Looking for an engineering leader who can help grow your company? We should talk — today.

Recent Writing

Rebooting communities

2025 was an 'interesting' year. For me it was best defined by the rebooting of several open source, technical communities. This post is a pause-and-think reflection on close to ~14 months of community building. This post was written in late 2025, but took a few weeks to sit,

Behind the scenes: selecting Brisbane!

This post was originally published at https://2026.pycon.org.au/posts/behind-the-scenes-selecting-brisbane/. The directors desk is an informal series of blog posts I write for PyCon AU 2026. As conference director, its intended to be a little off-the-cuff, a little behind the scenes, and a little long form essay.

How to stop using Cloudflare

Make sure your supply chain doesn't platform violent extremists - it's time to migrate away from Cloudflare.

The grift economy

It feels like every week or so there's a new LinkedIn InMail recruiting me for crypto or NFT focused startups. This is my long form reply: I'm not interested. For all the nuanced technical benefits, the world of cryptocurrency is rife with scams and malpractice that