I’m one of those lucky people who discovered early on in life that I could make a career doing what I love ‐ developing software. With a few exceptions, my work has focused on building online applications. Below are a few notable highlights and accomplishments.
The Early Years
I was fortunate enough to work for my first startup while in college. Western Computer Link was an Internet Service Provider during the mid-90s growth spurt of the Internet. I had a great relationship with WCL: I helped manage the systems in return for free dial-up access 👍.
WCL didn’t really have a web site when I worked there. There wasn’t much point, since very few people had a browser on their computer. Email was the killer-app of the Internet. In fact, people could walk into our office and buy Netscape Navigator, which came in a cardboard box.
The WCL screenshot is from the Internet Archive, circa 1997. I had moved on by that time, so I can’t take any credit for the site.
I will take credit for creating this early online profile, though. Yeah, I’ve been a big Linux fan for a long time.
The Consulting Years
After College I moved to Calgary and over the next decade got a great mix of development experience. I started with SCADA software. I then moved onto online product-focused worked, first as a consultant for Montage IT Services and finally as a freelance-contractor.
In early 2007 I decided to go on an adventure. My wife and I packed up and moved from Calgary to Los Angeles, and began an exploration of the Golden State. We’re still here. Not at all surprising since California is a large, varied, wonderful place 😀.
JibJab
In Los Angeles I immediately went to work on a project for JibJab. I built out the Rails backend for their initial Starring You product (which is now ecards). It was a wonderful introduction to a culture where online software development was the primary focus of the company, and I knew I’d found my niche.
Tapioca Mobile
Following the initial product release of the JibJab project, I moved to San Diego to work with Tapioca Mobile. Tapioca had just received funding and was scaling out their team. The company was five people strong when I joined.
At Tapioca, we built out a service that distributed videos to cell-phones using MMS. It was an incredible experience. The technology we worked on was as challenging as it was varied. Our system handled video uploads and management, video transcoding (for dozens of different device capabilities and formats), SMS and MMS aggregator integration, and a distributed workflow to tie it all together.
Although the company ceased operations abruptly in 2010 for complicated and unfortunate reasons, it was still one of the best work experiences I have ever had. There was another silver lining too, moving on from Tapioca brought me the Bay Area.
Silicon Valley
Moving to the Bay Area has been incredible. Even though technology startups are anywhere and everywhere today, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley exude a strong sense of entrepreneurialism, and host a large and active community that I am thrilled, every day, to be involved with.
Zendesk
I’ve had the pleasure of working on very interesting projects in Silicon Valley. One notable company is Zendesk, which recently had its very successful IPO. While I wasn’t at Zendesk long, I was able to make some good friends and work with many talented engineers on several interesting projects. I’m happy for all my friends and colleagues there, who definitely are deserving of their success.
While I typically prefer to join companies when they are just starting to scale, I joined Zendesk later in its growth. They were already at 40 employees when I started, and expanding at a tremendous rate. It wasn’t long before I was looking for a much younger startup.
Realgravity
My real love is to take small companies and scale them up. Realgravity gave me that chance again. When I started at Realgravity the company was less than 10 people, split between Los Angeles and San Francisco. My work developing our online video services was both fun and challenging. I was able to scale up the service several orders of magnitude as well as build out a team of talented people.
In 2012 Realgravity was acquired by Scripps Networks Interactive and its focus changed to meet the demands of an internal SNI project (since released as ulive). This change brought other new experiences for me. Although SNI kept Realgravity as a separately run entity, I went from working for a company that had 5 people at its previous holiday party (including spouses!), to a company of more than 2000 people.
My Own Path
I always knew that someday I wanted to strike out and build a company from scratch. Of course, I didn’t do it on my own. I found a great co-founder, who had a good idea to work on, and we started building Blujack.
In the summer of 2013 I joined the ranks of the unemployed and started working on all aspects of Blujack. After spending two decades working mainly on startups, I thought I had a good handle on what that would entail. How naive of me. I learn more and more, each and every day, about all aspects of this business. The Blujack experience has enriched my knowledge, not just from a software engineering perspective, but has provided me with great insight into the business, financial, legal and personal aspects of starting and running a company. It has made me even more confident that I can be a contributing member of this industry I care so much about.
The images above are copyright their respective owners.