Peter Whitehouse – teaching over measurement

Peter Whitehouse retired in 2022 and I completely missed it.

I went to St. Joseph’s College, Gregory Terrace in Brisbane. Let me be clear: I was a spectacularly shit student. Distracted, heavily opinionated, and fundamentally opposed to listening to people who knew more than me. Terrace mostly held me up anyway, and a few poor souls did real work to keep me on the rails. Damian Fall, who’s now the principal, was one of them. Nicola Crawford was another. She was my English teacher, somehow spoke my exact language, kept me engaged against my will and had a gorgeous voice. I owe them both a massive apology, and a lot of thanks.

Up until grade 9 our IT classes were basically competitive touch-typing to get our fingers right on the keyboard. That is probably why my typing is so fast today. I wanted to win. Though moving to the UK and re-learning the British layout has set me back about a decade.

That was the ceiling of what school thought computing was. Queensland’s education system cared more about the syllabus than what the tech industry actually needed. While the real world was shifting to dynamic web apps, Agile delivery and version control, the state curriculum was still grading kids on how well they could format a spreadsheet or write pseudocode on a piece of paper.

And then Peter Whitehouse stepped in.

He was a teacher, but the worst kind. A menace to the state curriculum. He basically ignored the textbook and did the right thing. He actually taught.

He ran the school IT club and let us use whatever we wanted. If you had a weird idea or coded something dumb, he didn’t try to grade the stupidity out of you. He pushed you to keep building it. He taught me Pascal before it ever appeared in the curriculum, and when we eventually got to it in class I was miles ahead. He always said, “If you’re ever successful, I’ll take your second million,” and I sort of stand by that today. Long before ChatGPT existed I had Peter Whitehouse. I could ask him anything and if he didn’t know the answer he would find it. It was the first time I didn’t actively hate being in a classroom.

He wrote his own material. He taught Agile principles to 16-year-olds just as Agile was attacking Australian industry. His textbook lived on wonko.info/ipt, hopefully up forever because I think it should be a piece of internet history. Classic HTML. Would win awards for ugly design. Proper, raw web publishing. He updated it out of hours and kept it completely open-source. The footer notes it ran on spare time and Belgian chocolate.

The curriculum in class was the curriculum he published. QLD gov should learn a thing or two.

But his real legacy for me is memory management.

He taught me memory management when I was 15. Because of him I still hold a guilt-based approach to wasting system resources today. A shitty memory leak or bad garbage collection isn’t a footnote. It’s the seed of a system that fails under load. You don’t process terabytes of vehicle data per second, or run AI inference at scale, if you skipped the part where someone made you care about every byte. You get there because a teacher in Brisbane made you build well-optimised systems before you knew what well-optimised meant.

The frustrating part is that the curriculum still hasn’t caught up. We’re still measuring what kids can recite, not what they can build. I’ve hired a lot of engineers and the best rememberer is never as sharp as the best solver. That gap is going to widen. AI is shifting the job from writing code to deciding what to build, and the kids being trained to recite are training for the part of the work that’s getting automated first.

Peter was already teaching the part that survives. Knowing what to build, how to compose it, where the constraints actually bite. None of that comes from the syllabus. It comes from being made to think about systems before you write a line of code. I hope the QLD government takes a look at his work and steals it wholesale.

Peter, I know you’re retired. But the students you’d be teaching now need you more than we did. AI systems demand your style and your approach, and you could teach it. If you ever need a guest speaker to come tell kids why they shouldn’t ignore their teachers like I did, I’m there.

I wouldn’t be doing what I do today without you. What a fucking great teacher.