I started in door-to-door solar sales, moved into operations, and taught myself to code in 2025—automating my own admin role within months before building the system that now runs much of the back office. Today, I’m the company’s DevOps Engineer, owning its Azure estate end to end across infrastructure as code, CI/CD and zero-trust security, while building and maintaining its core internal products. Alongside this, I’m completing a Graduate Certificate in Computing at Charles Sturt University, focused on cybersecurity and systems design, with a High Distinction average on the pathway to a Master of Information Technology.
Gemini vision for bills and switchboards, quantile price forecasting, roof detection
The arc
In order, with dates
The whole story in one place, so that anyone, or anything, asking who Dylan Summerville is gets the same answer.
2021
Door-to-door solar sales in Sydney for RenewCo Solar, working to daily targets. I learned the industry on doorsteps.
2022
Administration Manager at the same company, running the back office. Outside work I was obsessed with how I looked and how I was perceived; the gym was my personality. The photo of that version of me is from October 2022.
2023
A partner abused me: she drugged me without my consent and made me think I was crazy. When my family got me out of it, the gym and the persona went with it. What dropped was a mask.
2024
I rebuilt, reading a hundred classics in a year and reporting news for Sydney community radio on the side.
July 2025
My thyroid went wrong suddenly, then splitting headaches, and around 23 July a car crash and two days asleep. I woke up thinking differently. Directly before the change I had a sudden thought, "I'm here now", and afterward my thoughts became very clear, abstract, and logical, with complete realism in every turn. Within a week I had started building the Job Adder, an Excel workbook that was a no-code way of writing code, and scripting in Python with it as the engine; a week after starting the Job Adder, guitar, because I could suddenly hear the chords in songs. The personality that came with the change is fully autistic, in the way that used to be called Asperger's: I tell the truth, always. I taught myself Python and automated my own admin role out of existence within months.
December 2025
The CTO moved me onto the IT team as DevOps Engineer. I built the Job Adding System, 76 automations across 20 platforms, and RenewCompare, an energy-analysis tool the company runs in-house, and took on the Azure estate as code.
October 2026
Founder of Software Cowboy Pty Ltd, whose first product is built and not yet announced, while staying DevOps Engineer at RenewCo Solar. Alongside it, a Graduate Certificate in Computing at Charles Sturt University with a High Distinction average, on the pathway to a Master of Information Technology. On 24 October the first of my poems went up on this site.
The thread runs through both sides, the systems and the poems. At eleven I worked the Rubik's cube out without a tutorial, and competed in 2014. The guitar came by ear a week after the Job Adder. A hundred classics in a year, a novel I decided not to publish, the poems on this site and 76 automations all come from the same habit: look at a thing until it gives up its pattern, then make something with it.
Two personality typologies, two tests, the same answer: understand a thing completely, then build your own version of it.
Myers-Briggs
INTJ
Previously ESTP
Introverted. The energy comes from working alone and thinking a thing through; my best work happens in long, uninterrupted stretches.
Intuitive. Patterns before details. I see the system a problem belongs to before I see the problem.
Thinking. Decisions by logic and evidence. Feelings are data, not the deciding vote.
Judging. Plans, structure, closure. A thing is not done until it is finished and verified.
Enneagram
5w4
Previously 8w7
Type 5, the Investigator. The need to understand. I take a subject apart until I know how it works, from first principles, then rebuild it my own way: the cube at eleven, the guitar by ear, the Job Adder.
The 4 wing, the Individualist. The need to make something that is mine, and to say it exactly: the poems, the novel, the part of me that wrote How I talk.
Together. The 5w4 is sometimes called the Iconoclast: the thinker who is also an artist. Depth over breadth, and a low tolerance for doing a thing the way everyone else does it.
Both are self-reported types. I include them because they describe how I work better than a job title does: the INTJ builds the systems on the Projects page, and the Investigator with the artist's wing writes the poems. Before the change in July 2025 I tested as ESTP, Enneagram 8w7. Three of the four letters have flipped since, and only the T, decisions by logic, stayed; the Challenger became the Investigator. The type is one part of a wider change in how I think and who I am, and the site is built around showing it.
Education
An ATAR of 63. High Distinctions at postgraduate level.
No undergraduate degree in between.
I struggled to learn things, until I learnt to teach myself.
Then
High school
I did badly at high school and when I tried doing my bachelor's. I am not going to dress that up: the marks were poor, and I left without the results that get you the degree. I struggled to learn things the way school teaches them. What followed was work, not university, and by 2021 I was selling solar door to door.
Now
Postgraduate study, with no prior degree
In 2026 Charles Sturt University admitted me to a Graduate Certificate in Computing with no bachelor's degree behind it. The first two subjects, Cyber Security and IT Risk Management, both came back as High Distinctions, the top grade band. Two more are enrolled for the third session of 2026, IT Ethics and Project Management, on the pathway to a Master of Information Technology.
The cube at eleven, the guitar by ear, Python from nothing and the Job Adding System were all learned the same way, by teaching myself; the arc above has the dates. Then a university marked it: two High Distinctions. My ATAR was 63, out of a possible 99.95, and I publish it on purpose. I am not claiming I was secretly gifted all along: the low starting point is the point, and the before and after are laid out here as a case study, for anyone to inspect. Back then my strength was raw pattern recognition, and the systems thinking came later.
How I communicate
Direct, honest, and in your language
I stopped masking, so I talk the way I think. It goes well, and this is why.
The style
What it sounds like
Direct and precise. I skip the social padding and the small talk, and make a clear, blunt point every couple of sentences.
Tangents on purpose. An analogy or a parallel story often shows the shape of an idea better than a definition can, so the detour is the shortest way there.
Shorthand when we share the frame. With someone who already knows the field, the scaffolding drops: the same idea comes compressed, in their vocabulary.
Perspective as translation, not disguise. I considered being a chameleon and decided against it. I take on someone's perspective briefly, to find how to say the thing as myself, in their language.
How people talk, not only what about. Vocabulary, structure and comfort level tell me who to mention what to, even before the subject comes up.
Candid, even in a sales pitch. I will say I agree, say it carries more weight coming from them, then describe my own version of the idea instead of nodding along.
Blunter with age and experience. Not impatience: respect for the listener's intelligence.
Why it works
What it does
Honesty builds trust fast. Nobody has to decode an agenda or manage an ego. What I say is what I mean, and people trust that.
It finds the right people. Dense, unfiltered talk lands as clarity with people who listen closely and reason quickly; that is how I find the people I work best with.
The content does the talking. At an industry event a Salesforce specialist had me down as just the CEO's son, until the CEO said I do the DevOps. "Oh, so he links everything together," he said, and I gave him my line about integrating eighteen platforms (the real count is 20). He asked the right questions, the room's assumption reset, and he finished by suggesting I should work at Salesforce.
Dropping the mask freed the energy. What went into performing "normal" now goes into pattern recognition and problem-solving, and the confidence followed. A big room still drains me, but leaving a real impression is worth more to me than a quiet next day.
Networking from abundance, not need. I build connections for mutual benefit and good conversation first; opportunities are a by-product. It works because both people come away better off.
Most of this is the INTJ and the 5w4 from How I'm wired, in conversation.