Hi, I’m Darren.

I love computers. I have loved them for as long as I can remember. I built them as a kid, my first job was in a computer shop, and I was the child giving school presentations about wanting to become a programmer.

Then life went a different way for a while.

I ended up in the music industry and built a business as an event producer, festival organiser, and tour promoter. I worked on tours and festivals with some of the biggest acts in the world. Tech stayed with me, but mostly as a hobby.

At the end of 2020, Covid had pretty much destroyed that business, and I was ready for a change. Around the same time I discovered Ethereum, started mining, found DeFi, and fell properly into crypto and Web3. I had a good year in 2021 and decided to make the career pivot I had always wanted to make.

I spent 2022 teaching myself to code. After about eight months I landed my first junior role at GAAP Point of Sale. Less than a year later I had been promoted to software engineer and had become one of the stronger members of the team. The goal was still the same: eventually work on serious crypto projects as an engineer.

After GAAP, I joined a team building an EVM-based DAO.fun fork on Berachain. We worked on it for around five months, but we couldn’t find product-market fit and moved on.

From there we built and deployed a DEX on HyperEVM, based on Algebra Integral V4. That one got real traction for a while, peaking at just over $5M in TVL and doing roughly $500M in lifetime volume. Eventually we couldn’t compete where the market was going, and we wound the project down.

Since then, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the practical side of integrating AI into businesses.

At Exactius, I build tools and workflows for non-technical teams: guardrails that allow them to ship code, live context layers, custom agents, and multi-stage automations. I keep context current and provide the infrastructure, software, and systems that make businesses more productive with AI.

Outside of that, I’m building Shisa-Fosho, a prediction market project that I am using to experiment with agentic development, learn about Go microservices, and orderbook-based trading systems.