How an episode of Home Delivery led to a home run for Zane's career as a software engineer | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

At the time, in 2020, Zane had just started his Computer Science degree – a foundation student of the program at UniSC’s new Moreton Bay campus.

Just out of high school, he was young. He was smart. Driven. Extremely capable. But also impressively relaxed and easy-going by nature.

So when he saw Atlassian founder and tech billionaire Scott Farquhar on Home Delivery, the angel-investor’s story resonated with him.

“I just connected to it because he was a normal Australian guy who had a normal upbringing,” Zane says.

“That really made me want to work for Atlassian – because I figured they’d have a really good culture.”

The laid-back Sunny Coaster-local initially applied for an internship with Australia’s biggest and most well-known tech company when he was only in his second year of uni – he jokingly recalls being immediately rejected.

But never one to rest on his laurels, he remained focussed on honing his skills as a programmer and software engineer through his degree.

Truthfully, he already had a lot of those skills before he started uni, having taught himself to code in high school as a “side hustle” because he thought it would be a good skill to have – and, honestly, once he started learning it, he fell in love with it.

But it was opportunities such as being able to design and develop an app as part of a multi-disciplinary research project at UniSC called NOBURN – a project using photos submitted by citizen scientists to help predict bushfires – that really stands out from his time at uni.

As with everything in design and development, there were plenty of hurdles along the way, including when Zane and his app-development partner considered switching frameworks two-months into the project because they were having trouble finding enough online support for the framework they were using.

“It seemed like we were too far into the project at the time,” Zane says. “But looking back now, we could have restarted and it wouldn’t have been a problem.
“Either way, we’re really happy with the result now.”

Inaugural Computer Science program coordinator Dr Erica Mealy, a self-confessed ‘Technology and Design Evangelist’, said students such as Zane excelled in the degree because they had a genuine passion for everything computer and technology related.

“The hands-on experience and insight gained through these experiences is invaluable when it comes to applying the skills and knowledge learned through the degree.”

After he’d been knocked back from the internship with Atlassian, Zane applied for a graduate position with them.

“It was actually the only role I applied for post-uni because it was the only place I wanted to work,” Zane says.

Zane didn’t get the role at first – despite performing well during the interviews – because that intake in July had already filled up. But he was soon offered a grad position on the data migrations team as part of the February 2024 intake.

“We work with all the largest customers to help migrate their data from our current data-centre products to the cloud – because everything's moving online,” Zane says.

Zane was not only one of the only new hires to come from Queensland in that intake – he was the only one from the Sunshine Coast, where he remains based as one of the 40 percent of the Atlassian employees who are mostly working remotely.

“I’d really like to push the message that you can still get into tech if you’re from the Sunshine Coast – you don’t need to go to the city,” Zane says.

“I never wanted to leave the Sunny Coast for uni – I didn’t want to move to the city, which is a different path that I think most people in the industry take.”