Meet Bay McGovern

Demelza Green • Feb 11, 2024

Bay didn’t start her career out in software development. At school, Bay excelled at maths and physics, but adored writing, English and drama; lost in a world of Romeo and Juliet and epic fantasy. As a teenager she believed a career in journalism would be the perfect job to tie together these passions. But the hard-hitting truth of the industry landed on her like a tonne of bricks; it wasn’t the romanticised Lois and Clark version of the job she had dreamt of.


Journalism was hard. It wasn’t hard due to the writing, it was hard because a lot of people didn’t want to talk to you. And, when you wrote articles you needed to write them with a balanced point of view. So, even if you disagreed with the topic, even if it was something you felt passionate about, you had to stay in a neutral zone and talk to opposing sides (conflict averse anyone?). For someone as passionate about people as Bay, this disconnected and combative view of the world didn’t fit.

In need of a break from journalism, Bay’s budding romance led her to work a season at Thredbo, where she had gotten a job as a lift attendant by claiming she could snowboard, something she hadn’t ever tried. After a season on the slopes, she had mastered that turn and was in love with the sport.


When people look at doing a working holiday overseas, they usually gravitate towards the UK. Bay had family over there so it made sense. But, in a turn of events, ended up heading to Vancouver, Canada, where both her and her husband could work off the slopes, but still carve it up on the weekend.

The new start on life left Bay thinking about a permanent move out of journalism. She landed a job as a Project Co-ordinator in IT. Getting into IT was a fluke, the same for many people in the industry today. She quickly took on jobs outside of her role, leveraging her skills as a journalist, interviewing people, and writing stories. But this time they were not the stories you read in the newspapers, rather the stories developers read to break down features into working software. There are a lot of correlations between agile sprint delivery, and that of producing a weekly paper in terms of deadlines and concise, clear language. Bay was in love with this role, and the rest was history.


Bay has worked as a Business Analyst and Product Owner now for most of her career. It’s important for her to work where her contributions are valued, where she enjoys the people she works with, and can continue to learn and grow.


At Patient Zero Bay plays an additional role of a custodian. The custodians are here to help people grow, learn, and just be a rubber ducky when someone needs to work through a problem. She connects the Product Owner collective through a monthly lean coffee style catch up. As a group they have a wealth of experiences to help each other out. The role of the Product Owner in Patient Zero is multi-faceted but can also be quite lonely. We don’t have business analysts, project managers, scrum masters, or agile coaches as individuals, they all form part of this role in a sea of developers.


Bay’s advice for those just getting started out in the industry is to have faith in yourself, keep going and do your best. It takes some time to get where you want to go, so don’t let that hold you back.


Outside of work Bay has a passionate love of wine, a pastime she shares with her dad. If there was one wine she couldn’t live without it would be a Coonawarra cab sav, but don’t hold that against her. If you ever cross paths with her, don’t forget to ask about her 8-month trip around Australia in a camper trailer with her husband and two kids (and a lot of dust and wind). As you can imagine, there are a few stories to share – best told over a glass of wine.


Share This Post

Get In Touch

Recent Posts

Prompt Injection Capture-the-flag – Red Team x AI

By Joe Cooney • 02 Apr, 2024
Red-team challenges have been a fun activity for PZ team members in the past, so we recently conducted a small challenge at our fortnightly brown-bag session, focusing on the burgeoning topic of prompt injection. Injection vulnerabilities all follow the same basic pattern – un-trusted input is inadvertently treated as executable code, causing the security of the system to be compromised. SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS) are probably two of the best-known variants, but other technologies are also susceptible. Does anyone remember XPath injection? As generative models get incorporated into more products, user input can be used to subvert the model. This can lead to the model revealing its system prompt or other trade secrets, reveal information about the model itself which may be commercially valuable, subvert or waste computation resources, perform unintended actions if the model is hooked up to APIs, or cause reputational damage to the company if the model can be coerced into doing amusing or inappropriate things. As an example, entrepreneur and technologist Chris Bakke was recently able to trick a Chevy dealership’s ChatGPT-powered bot into agreeing to sell him a Chevy Tahoe for $1 . Although the U.S. supreme court has yet to rule on the legal validity of a “no takesies backsies” contract (as an employee of X Chris is probably legally obligated to drive a Tesla anyway) it is not hard to imagine a future scenario with steeper financial consequences.

Five Key Areas for AI Disruption in Insurance

27 Feb, 2024
With the advent of ChatGPT, Bard/Gemini and Co-pilot, Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have been thrust into the spotlight. AI is set to disrupt all industries, especially those that are predominately based on administrative support, legal, business, and financial operations, much like insurance and financial organisations.

Running AI locally when GPT-4 goes crazy

By Joe Cooney • 22 Feb, 2024
One of the features of life working at PZ is our brown bag lunch and learn sessions; presentations by staff on topics of interest – sometimes, but not always technical, and hopefully amusing-as-hell. Yesterday we took a break from discussing the book Accelerate and the DORA metrics to take a whirlwind tour of the current state of play running “open source” generative AI models locally. Although this talk had been ‘in the works’ for a while, one challenge was that it needed to constantly be revised as the state of AI and LLMs changed. For example, the Stable Video Diffusion examples looked kind of lame in comparison to OpenAI’s Sora videos (released less than a week ago) and Groq’s amazing 500 token-per-second hardware demo on Monday/Tuesday , and the massive context size available now in the Gemini 1.5 models (released a few hours before OpenAI announced Sora...coincidence? An effort by OpenAI to steal back the limelight! Surely NOT!). And now a day later, with the paint still drying on a highly amusing slide-deck for the talk, Google releases their “open-source" Gemma models! The day itself presented an excellent example of why having more control of your models might be a good thing. ChatGPT 4 users began reporting “crazy” and highly amusing responses to fairly normal questions . We became alerted to this when one of our own staff reported on our internal Slack about a crazy response she received to a question about the pros and cons of some API design choices. The response she got back started normally enough, but then began to seem to channel Shakespeare’s Macbeth and some other olde English phrases and finished thusly. "Choose the right charm from the box* dense or astray, it’ll call for the norm. Your batch is yours to halter or belt. When in fetch, marry the clue to the pintle, and for the after, the wood-wand’s twist'll warn it. A past to wend and a feathered rite to tend. May the gulch be bygones and the wrath eased. So set your content to the cast, with the seal, a string or trove, well-deep. A good script to set a good cast. Good health and steady wind!" The sample JSON payload was also in keeping with the rest of the answer. { "htmlContent": "

Your HTML here

", "metadata": { "modifiedBy": "witch-of-the-wood", "safety": "sanitized", "mood": "lunar" } } Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Although there were no reports of the GPT4 API being affected by this (only ChatGPT) it might have given people developing automated stock trading bots using GPT4 a reason to pause and contemplate what might have been if their stock portfolio now consisted of a massive long position on Griselda’s Cauldron Supplies. As ChatGPT would say, Good health and steady wind.

Unpacking Cybersecurity in Our Latest Webinar

By Demelza Green • 04 Dec, 2023
Cybersecurity is everyone's business. Nearly every day when you open the tech news there is something covering a new esoteric vulnerability that researchers have discovered, massive data breach, or a cybersecurity attack. Some vulnerabilities that are discovered are truly remarkable. A recent discovery by researchers was that they were able to recover secret keys from non-compromised devices using video footage of their power LED obtained from a commercial video camera 16 meters away. Is it time to start putting black tape over all our power LEDs as well as our webcams? Boarding up the windows? Although these attention-grabbing attacks seem straight out of a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie, the reality is that many of the high-profile hacks you hear about using much more mundane methods and could have been prevented if good development security practices were in place. Shifting left on security and having a good grasp of OWASP principles is a great foundation, but so is the need to have a strong security culture, with a focus on continuous learning. We recently hosted a webinar with our senior developers Daniel Dekel and Joseph Cooney in partnership with the Johner Institute . Titled “Shift Left on Security”, the session highlighted the critical need to address security concerns right from the get-go in the software development life cycle. Here are some key takeaways they shared: Prioritise responsible handling and managing sensitive and personal data. Use secure frameworks and libraries, alert mechanisms and conduct threat modelling. Give your teams hands-on security training and implement best practice security policies. The webinar also covers details on a Red Team Workshop we conducted at Patient Zero, where participants worked in small teams to solve hacking challenges against the clock. A Red Team Workshop is a bit of training, a bit of teamwork, and a lot of fun, all centred around cybersecurity. Tune into the webinar to hear more insights about pushing left on security, and the Red Team Workshop we conducted.
More Posts
Share by: