I grew up in Taranaki, New Zealand, which if you don’t know it is a place where the two things the local economy valued were dairy farming (the best in the world) and rugby (also the best) - and I was absolutely useless at both!
What I could do was remember a car’s license plate from 1976 (CE 4021, my grandfather’s Vauxhall, still burned into my brain). I could spend an entire Christmas Day on an Amiga 500 and genuinely not notice the sun had gone down. I could read a book about how gunpowder worked and then go out and actually make some. But I couldn’t eat a cucumber. More on that later.
The gunpowder kid
So I learned somewhere, probably from a library book because this was well before the internet, that gunpowder was a combination of specific ingredients. And they turned out to be surprisingly easy for a child to get hold of in 1980s New Zealand! I found sulphur at the port in New Plymouth where my grandparents lived. There were just huge stockpiles of chemicals sitting around, and apparently nobody thought a kid wandering through them was a problem. The rest I got from the local chemist in Manaia.
Mixed together in the correct ratio in a plastic ice cream container, it worked! I had actual gunpowder!
What I couldn’t figure out was how to do anything useful with it. Everything I tried to pack it into would just fizz out of whatever hole I used for the fuse when I lit it. And then I accidentally dropped a match into the entire container. The whole lot just fizzed away in this spectacular whoosh and, thankfully, didn’t explode. Just a very startled kid and a ruined ice cream container and the lingering smell of sulphur.
I could reverse-engineer the chemistry from a book but I couldn’t think through what would happen next. That turned out to be a pattern that would follow me around for a very long time!
The Otakeho tip and the car horns
I used to visit the Otakeho rubbish dump regularly because back in the 70s and 80s, rubbish dumps were absolute treasure troves. Farm equipment, old cars, electronics, magazines, you name it. I once found one of those yellow flashing construction lights that road crews put out, and I was obsessed with it for weeks. Just sitting in my room with this thing flashing away. I found a control panel from a farmer’s milking shed, and it became the bridge of a spaceship in my bedroom. Because obviously that’s what you do with a milking shed control panel!
One time I found several car horns still attached to old car chassis. I pulled them out, wired them all up to a car battery, and hid the whole lot in the garage. The plan was that when my stepfather drove in after work, they would all go off at once. Which they did. Spectacularly. The noise was incredible!
I got into a lot of trouble for that one.
I also wrote a letter to the cast of The Famous Five, the 70s TV series based on the Enid Blyton books. I sent them a dollar, which was my entire pocket money. They wrote back very nicely, said thanks but we don’t need your dollar, and sent a whole bunch of signed photos. I got into trouble for that too because apparently sending your pocket money to television actors is not sensible behaviour.
Empathic, creative, full of ideas, but no common sense. That was the family verdict and I heard it a lot!
The CNG mountain
My stepfather worked at the natural gas plant in Kapuni. One day he came home with a CNG tank fitted to the car. It was a dual fuel system, with a switch on the dashboard to toggle between petrol and CNG. There was an in-between position you had to use to drain one fuel before switching to the other.
He said I could take the car out for a drive to practice because I was learning at the time. “Just drive it till the CNG runs out.”
Now what he meant was switch to the middle position and drive a couple of hundred metres until the remaining CNG drained from the switchover tank. Simple.
What I understood was drive until the full tank of CNG runs out.
So I drove around Mount Taranaki. At least twice. For about four hours. As the sun started setting and I still hadn’t run out of gas, I began to think something might not be right. But I kept going, because he said drive until it runs out, and it hadn’t run out yet! By the time I got home it was dark and I was in enormous trouble.
My stepfather’s conclusion: “couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.”
And honestly, back then, he had a point! I could read university-level physics books at 14. I could build gunpowder from scratch and wire electrical systems from dump scraps. But I couldn’t follow a simple instruction about draining a fuel tank. We didn’t have the language for neurodivergence back then, or any understanding of what it meant to have an IQ of 156 in an environment that had no use for it. It was just “clever but no common sense” and that label stuck to me for decades.
The cucumber situation
I should explain the cucumber thing because it’s actually part of the same picture. I cannot eat cucumbers, peppers, onions, tomatoes or anything with certain textures. It happened because I had a very strict auntie, and when we visited she would force you to eat whatever was put in front of you. I remember being forced to eat tomatoes once and nearly throwing up. It became a real problem in the family because my mum would always have to cook special meals for me, which annoyed my stepfather. I couldn’t eat bread with seeds on it, or cheese, or all sorts of things that normal kids ate. Even now, I get genuinely anxious if I’m going to someone’s house for dinner and I don’t know what they’re cooking. If there are peppers or raw onions or fish bones in it, I just can’t eat it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it is! It’s a sensory thing and it contributes a lot to my social anxiety even as an adult.
I’m telling you this because it’s all part of the same story. A brain that works differently means everything works differently. Not just the intellectual stuff but the food, the social situations, the instructions about CNG tanks, all of it.
What none of this was worth in 1980s Taranaki
You couldn’t trade gunpowder expertise for rugby points. You couldn’t wire car horns into a farming career. Being able to memorise license plates and build spaceships out of milking shed control panels didn’t get you invited to parties, or picked for teams, or understood by anyone.
So I built things underground. Not literally underground but in the sense that everything I made and thought about was invisible to the world around me. I built worlds nobody asked for and nobody saw. Alarm systems from scrap parts. Homemade explosives in ice cream containers. Control panels for imaginary spacecraft. Stories and programs and circuits and experiments, all for an audience of one.
I did this for decades. Through school, through university, through film school, through working at Weta Digital on Lord of the Rings. The environment changed but the instinct never did. See a system, pull it apart, understand how it works, build something better from the pieces.
The kid and the consultant are the same person
Fast forward to now and I’ve built 18 apps and tools in the last year alone. A clipboard manager, a remote desktop app, a health dashboard, a financial tracker, a second brain that monitors what I’m working on and surfaces things I’ve forgotten about. A booking platform for restaurants. A teaching tool for a language school. A meal planning system for a nutritionist.
Every single one of them started the same way the car horns started. I looked at something, saw how it worked, saw what was wrong with it, and built a better version from whatever was available. That’s literally the Otakeho tip all over again, just with code instead of car batteries!
The difference isn’t capability. It never was. The difference is that the world eventually caught up with what kids like me were always doing. Pulling things apart. Understanding systems. Building something new from the pieces. And being a nerd has finally, mercifully, become cool!
It just took thirty years for anyone to notice. Including me.
If you’re still building underground
If you’re running a business and spending your time wrestling with tools that don’t fit, paying for software you only half use, and wishing someone could just build you the thing you actually need, that’s what I do now. The same instinct I’ve had since I was pulling car horns out of a rubbish dump in Taranaki. Just applied to your problem instead of mine.