Adeline Cook.

Adeline has spent more than 20 years making software work under real constraints: complex data, tight performance budgets, unfamiliar hardware, production deadlines and users who need the tool to be ready when they are.

Her professional work has ranged from Java/Spring services and geometry processing for construction estimating to Unreal Engine pipelines for broadcast production. She has built backend platform services for the NZ Herald and The Listener, the Octane renderer plugin for Unreal, rehabilitation games connected to Bluetooth hardware, and real-time 3D systems for browser and desktop. She also originated the outline technique behind Advanced Cel Shader, maintained it as a commercial product, and later sold it to Epic Games.

Poppy and Buddy is a separate line of work: a bilingual children's title spanning published books, a companion app, original animation and narration, and a QR-linked read-along system. She owns the whole product, so the engineering, design, content and release decisions are all hers to make.

Adeline's current personal project is Nova, a self-hosted Smart Home Control Surface used in her household. It brings lighting, climate, reminders, energy data and local voice control into one interface across a wall kiosk, browsers and Apple TV. It runs in her house every day, so it has to keep working after each development session ends, not just during it.

She uses coding agents daily and has built local tooling around them: sandboxing, model routing, progress monitoring and host-side verification. She writes the brief, sets the boundaries, reviews the output, and runs the tests. She moves between product detail and low-level diagnosis, and states plainly when a design needs to change.