Who is this Gavin bloke?

Me… well, I’m just on the wrong side of 50, and I live in an inner city apartment in Melbourne, Australia, up near the Queen Victoria Market.

Up until recently I was working as a Solution Architect in the finance industry in payments. In May ’24 my number came up in the contract renewal lottery and since I’d been working for 3 years and 4 months on a contract that had a 2 year limit it became impossible to get another renewal. I must have bubbled up to the top of someone’s spreadsheet.

I didn’t mind, I needed a break. So at the moment I’m officially “on a break” but I think that I’ve actually retired. I don’t think I could go back to the grind of 9-t0-5 anymore.

Prior to my last gig I worked in superannuation doing insurance (aka death and suffering) amongst other smaller projects, and before that I worked at one of Australia’s big 4 banks in the payments space, and prior to my move back into Solution Architecture I was in the Integration Solution Design team leading a number of projects to ensure reliable and consistent access to information you access everyday via the bank’s apps.

Before moving to the bank I worked in Technical Sales and Architecture for a multinational IT company helping their Business Partners in Australia and New Zealand sell and implement solutions using the vendor’s products. Before that role I was a services consultant for the same company for just over 3 years. In early 2016, after 11 years, my role was made redundant and spent the next couple of months traveling and working out what I wanted to do with my future. Sometime you need a good kick up the butt to reinvigorate yourself.

By night, I enjoy good company, good food and a good wine, and I can’t walk past a craft beer without having a taste.

I love to travel, and I did my fair share for work (12 years a Qantas Platinum Frequent Flyer – now lifetime Qantas Gold Frequent Flyer). One of the benefits of working for a large company was that I got to travel, which allowed me to sample cities and countries around the world on someone else’s dime to work out if I’d like to travel back there using your own money. These days I have to pay for my own travel 🙁 .

For places that I have visited in the past see here, and for places that I want to visit in the not too distant future see here.

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