david bolis / field notes

SOFTWARE ENGINEER · EDUCATOR · BUILDER / SYDNEY

Serious about
building.
Curious about
everything.

I’m David. I turn complicated problems into software people can use—and make room for the experiments that lead somewhere unexpected.

David Bolis, wearing glasses and a charcoal blazer
DAVID BOLIS Engineer. Educator. Always exploring.
Professional portrait
created from my photograph with AI
Currently engineering at APRA
Teaching at UTS · Building at TapAway
SCROLL TO FOLLOW THE CONNECTIONS ↓
7+ yearsEngineering across industries
140+ projectsDelivered via Wix Marketplace
Builder + teacherTapAway founder · UTS academic
Follow the story ↘

THE THREAD THAT CONNECTS IT ALL

Understand it.
Build it.
Share what you learn.

I’m a Sydney-based software engineer, technical consultant and educator. My work has taken me from water meters and clinical research to banking systems, government workflows and the classroom.

I like working where technology meets a real human problem: understanding what someone needs, making the technical choices clear, and carrying the solution through to something they can use.

Outside that work, I follow questions. Sometimes they become a product. Sometimes a video. Sometimes a game about collaborating with your past self.

Follow a little curiosity ↓

01 / SELECTED WORK

Ideas, made tangible.

From a question in the classroom
to a product in someone’s pocket.

01 / BAYESLABWeb application

Make uncertainty
understandable.

A visual Bayesian network and decision-analysis tool for teaching. Build a model, set the evidence, and see both the answer and the reasoning behind it.

TypeScriptReactExact inference
The engineering behind it

Variable elimination computes exact probabilities for discrete networks. Explain Mode measures each observation’s contribution by rerunning inference without it. A Web Worker handles larger networks; the interface reveals the arithmetic in layers.

The trade-off: exact inference supports inspectable results, but dense networks can become expensive. This is a teaching tool for discrete models, with explicit limits around multi-stage decisions and no parameter-learning claim.

BayesLab network editor showing Rain, Sprinkler and Wet Grass with an explanation panelA MODEL YOU CAN QUESTION. AN ANSWER YOU CAN EXPLAIN.
QUICKSIMLand.
Connect.
Go.
Travel data, without
the physical SIM swap.
QuickSIM app showing its travel eSIM destination catalogue
02 / MOBILE & INTEGRATIONSOn the App Store

QuickSIM

Travel eSIM discovery, plan comparison, purchase and installation in an iPhone app. A product that connects a simple customer journey to the services behind it.

iOSAPIseSIM delivery
View on the App Store ↗
What makes the problem interesting?

The purchase is only one part of the experience. Plan information, fulfilment, installation and recovery all need to make sense to someone arriving in an unfamiliar country. The product includes QR and manual installation options alongside the direct installation flow.

A conversational QuickSIM integration is also in development; it is separate from the released iOS app.

TAPAWAY / OPERATIONS
RestaurantA stock requestCentral kitchenPrepare & fulfilHead officeVisibility & invoicing
ONE ORDER. EVERYONE IN THE LOOP.
03 / BUSINESS SYSTEMSPlatform showcase

Connected hospitality

A restaurant operations platform connecting venue ordering, central-kitchen fulfilment, stock needs, invoicing and role-based visibility across a group.

Workflow designIntegrationsAccess control
Explore the platform ↗
Designing around people and processes

A restaurant manager, kitchen team and head office need different views of the same transaction. The challenge is keeping the workflow connected while making each role’s next action clear.

The linked showcase uses illustrative interfaces and sample data. Integration scope depends on the organisation’s systems.

A SMALL DETOUR / TRY IT YOURSELF

A little evidence.
A different answer.

The grass is wet. Did it rain?
Move the prior belief, then add the observation. This tiny model is the kind of thinking BayesLab makes visible.

An illustrative model: wet grass occurs 90% of the time with rain and 20% without rain. These are teaching assumptions, not weather measurements.

THE WET GRASS EXPERIMENT
PRIOR BELIEF30.0%

No new evidence yet. Your belief stays at 30.0%.

Show me the calculation

P(rain) = 0.30. Observe wet grass to apply Bayes’ rule.

02 / THE CURIOSITY CABINET

Some things start
with “what if?”

A place for playful systems, research
questions and unfinished possibilities.

ECHO experiment preview
Playable experiment

ECHO

A small fracture in time. Rewind, leave an echo of your past actions, and collaborate with yourself to solve a puzzle.

Temporal mechanics · Browser gamePlay the experiment ↗
Open the field note

An exploration of time as a game mechanic. Three chambers test whether past actions can become tools for the present. Progress lasts for the current session.

MATTER experiment preview
Interactive experiment

MATTER

A real-time particle instrument. Forms scatter, reorganise and become something else: a knot, a galaxy, a word, a photograph.

WebGL · Creative codingExplore MATTER ↗
Open the field note

An experiment in direct manipulation and particle rendering. Built-in forms work locally. Photo and optional camera inputs stay on your device; the photo effect uses brightness, not reconstructed 3D depth.

Stormvault experiment preview
Published Roblox experiment

Stormvault

Venture into the storm, collect salvage, and decide when to bank it. Risk, competition and a reason to make one more run.

Roblox · Luau · MultiplayerView on Roblox ↗
Open the field note

A competitive salvage-survival experiment. Server-side checks govern interaction range, cooldowns and rewards. The published experience has age/access restrictions; console support and live persistence verification remain areas for further testing.

One More Thing experiment preview
Playable development build

One More Thing

Stack the parcels. Take the delivery. Resist the temptation to add just one more thing. A native game about balancing ambition with gravity.

SwiftUI · SpriteKit · iOSVisit the games showcase ↗
Open the field note

A native iPhone/iPad project with a delivery campaign, vehicles and local progression. It is a development build; the project records do not establish an App Store release. Device feel and release validation remain part of the work.

OPEN QUESTION / PERSONAL RESEARCH

Can everyday wearable signals
tell us more?

My glucose-prediction research explores whether physiological signals from a wearable can help model glucose patterns—and whether a personalised model changes the answer.

It’s an open research question, not a validated medical device or a substitute for glucose monitoring. The interesting work is in the data, the evaluation and the limits of what the signals can tell us.

Read the research notebook ↗

03 / THE STORY SO FAR

Different worlds.
The same curiosity.

Seven years of engineering, learning from people who see problems differently, and bringing the pieces together.

Read full résumé ↗
EDUCATIONBachelor of Software EngineeringUniversity of Technology Sydney
2018–2022
2026 — NOW

Australian Prudential Regulation Authority

Software Engineer

Owning enterprise solutions from stakeholder discovery through implementation and support. Automation, system integrations and practical AI capabilities within a regulated government environment.

Power Platform · ServiceNow · APIs · AI integrations
2020 — NOW

TapAway

Founder & Technical Consultant

Client-facing delivery across 140+ Wix Marketplace projects: uncovering requirements, explaining options, building custom workflows and integrations, and supporting the result.

Discovery · Solution design · REST / SOAP · Consulting
2023 — NOW

University of Technology Sydney

Casual Academic · alongside industry work

Teaching software and technology subjects, facilitating practical classes and mentoring students as they move from a concept to an implementation.

Teaching · Mentoring · Technical communication
2022 — 2026

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Security → iOS → Full stack → Murex systems

Work across secure cloud infrastructure, Swift mobile features, React/C# home-buying services and Python/C#/Perl automation for finance and trading workflows.

AWS · Terraform · OpenID · Swift · React · Python
2020 — 2022

Neuroscience Research Australia

Research Assistant / Junior Developer

Sole developer on a clinician-facing iPad application for proprioception assessment. Built a multidimensional driving assessment in Unity with clinical and research stakeholders.

Clinical collaboration · iPad · Unity · C#
2019 — 2020

Taggle Systems

Intern → Junior Software Engineer

An NFC-enabled iOS app for water-meter scanning and consumption analytics, Python tools, and work with NB-IoT and operational datasets.

Swift · MVVM · Python · IoT

BEYOND THE JOB TITLE

Technology begins
with people.

In 2019, UTS selected me for an Engineers Without Borders humanitarian engineering program in Cambodia. Working with local communities on a clean-energy concept was an early opportunity to practise human-centred design.

That thread runs through clinical software, client conversations and teaching: understanding the people involved is part of the engineering.

04 / THINKING OUT LOUD

Ideas are better
when you share them.

AI conversations, engineering essays,
tutorials and the occasional rabbit hole.

Visit MasteringProgramming ↗

Watch a video

Playback provided by YouTube. Open on YouTube ↗