About

I'm Nick Pratley, a network engineer and developer on the Central Coast of NSW, Australia. I've spent my career building software and networks for organisations far larger than the ones down the road.

These days I do that work through my own company, The IT Dept Pty Ltd, where most of the serious engineering happens: networks, software, and the infrastructure that has to run in production and stay up.

Twin Lakes Studio is the local side of it. It builds websites, booking systems and apps for the cafes, tradies, salons and clinics around Budgewoi, for one monthly price with nothing upfront. The same care that goes into the large jobs, turned toward the people nearby.

RFSPager.app is the one closest to home. It decodes the POCSAG pager network the NSW Rural Fire Service and Fire and Rescue NSW still run on, and turns it into live incident feeds and notifications for volunteers and the wider community. A small fleet of receivers, each a Raspberry Pi with a software-defined radio, listens for pages and feeds a web app and mobile apps on iOS and Android.

This blog is where I write things down: field notes from the hobby-ISP saga, Laravel in production, DNS plumbing, the occasional bit of reverse-engineering, and whatever else survives contact with a lab bench.

Find me on GitHub or email nick@npratley.net.