Software Architect & Principal Engineer — Brisbane, Australia.

Twenty years of enterprise product engineering: distributed JVM systems, cloud-native data platforms, and the delivery systems that make AI coding agents dependable in real codebases. I am drawn to problems where the boundaries are unclear and the consequences matter.

Headwater — documentation rots because nothing holds it accountable. Headwater turns a documentation corpus into a contract a machine can check. Documents declare what they are and which code they govern, a Rust engine checks them on every commit, and the graph shows AI coding agents exactly which documents apply to the file they're editing. It finds them by lookup, not by search. Headwater governs its own corpus, and its efficacy claims are measured and reported, not assumed.

Rust · Apache-2.0 · headwater.tools

VendKit — vendor curated slices of files across many repositories. The files stay in your tree and are owned like the rest of your code, held faithful to upstream by a checksum manifest, and upgraded through governed, review-gated pull requests. Built for the case where identical files have to exist in dozens of places: agent instructions, CI templates, linter configs, design tokens.

Go · Apache-2.0 · Documentation

Brisbane, Australia · james@baxter.consulting

_{Current work is Headwater and VendKit. Most of the other public repositories here are experiments from earlier years, kept as they were.}