Hello, worms! ✨

I’m Retno.

Powered by peanut butter, groovy jams, alt-milk lattes and runner's high. Collector of hobbies. Sometimes software engineer.

I’m an iOS engineer in Naarm (Melbourne). I appreciate beautiful experiences: the chew of freshly made sourdough, the ritual of brewing coffee, the process of putting a CD into a CD player and listening to an album start to finish.

I love storytelling too, whether that’s getting too emotionally involved in a fictional character’s journey or sitting around a dinner table with great humans and letting the conversation stretch out. I think that same love of depth, texture, and narrative shows up in the way I build products.

cropped portrait of retno sitting on a couch and smiling at the camera

Work

The short version

Software engineer (iOS) and MEng (EEE) graduate, based in Melbourne. I bring empathy, creativity, and clear communication to the way I work, and I’m drawn to software that feels thoughtful, useful, and considered in the details. I spent 5 years at Block building fintech across Cash App and Afterpay for tens of millions of people, and I care about great design, usable products, readable documentation, and leaving codebases better than I found them.

See the work page

Hobbies

The hobby collection

The non-work corners of the internet that probably explain me better than a neat professional summary ever could.

Music

Factory.fm

Playlists, listening habits, and the groovy jams part of the equation.

Listen

Running

Strava

Where the runner's high turns into maps, splits, and occasional stubbornness.

Give me kudos

Peanut Butter

How good is peanut butter?

The extremely important public research archive for a peanut butter snob.

Taste test

Books

Goodreads

Books I’ve loved, books I’m midway through, and future rabbit holes.

Browse the shelf

Inspiration

A few of my favourite things

Because Retno's recs has a nice ring to it.

Movies

  • In the Mood for Love
  • Mean Girls
  • 風立ちぬ (The Wind Rises)
  • Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)

Albums

  • Rumours - Fleetwood Mac
  • Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? - Metric
  • In Colour - Jamie xx
  • Since I Left You - The Avalanches

Books

  • Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder
  • When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut
  • Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
  • Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

My cat

  • Supermassive Black Hole (Soup for short)

Objects

  • KM5 CP2 CD player
  • MUJI Gel ink ballpoint pen 0.38mm
  • KitchenAid Artisan Tilt-head stand mixer

Recipes

Non-vegetarian

  • Rendang Daging - Eleanor Ford, Fire Islands
  • Ayam Betutu - Lara Lee
  • All Day Meat Lasagne - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Vegetarian

  • Lasagna With Spinach and Roasted Zucchini - Martha Rose Shulman
  • Tempeh Manis (Sweet Soy Tempeh) - Lara Lee
  • Miso Oats With Egg and Avocado - Hetty McKinnon