How do we, as engineers, designers, and product owners, build the interface that connects us to our users? How can we improve the tools we use to build it? How can we make the design & development experience as frictionless as possible? What's the most effective way to share UI knowledge and level up our teammates as we build?As it turns out, these are fascinating questions to obsessively pursue.

We needed a design system and a UI Team to work on that design system, so we made it happen.

I initially joined Digit on the Onboarding team, and helped build out the signup and onboarding flows for Digit Direct.

Briar Patch Labs was the umbrella under which my co-founder and I developed new projects and took them to market. My role at the company was taking ideas and turning them into products, which stretched all the way from initial wireframes in a notebook to managing production servers.

Origin Donor encompasses all of my consulting and freelance work. I'm not currently open for contract gigs, but I may be able to refer you out to my network if we're already acquainted.

My work at Discord focused mostly on translating the bold, colorful vector illustrations of the design team into code that conveyed a sense of movement and depth without bottoming out anyone's CPU.I stood on the shoulders of more than one giant there, and it's still among the work I'm most proud of.

Talkshow was an experiment in conversational media. I built the web version of it as a solo web dev (on a small, spectacularly talented team) using Express, React, Redux, Gulp and raw animal cunning. Live chat is an exceedingly fun engineering problem to solve. I ended up going with a relatively simple WebSocket -> Redux setup to keep clients fresh. React is already plenty good at reconciling ordered lists, so message ordering/integrity mostly took care of itself.

Winner of the 2013 "Best Canadian" award. Also ran a small team of front-end developers in a Ruby on Rails shop.In terms of work history, beRecruited is mostly noteworthy for being the place where React found its way onto my radar. By 2015 I had dipped my toes in far enough to commit to shipping production code with it, and it hasn't let me down since.

Handled front-end architecture & UI dev at a rather secretive startup that never made it to launch. Props to the founder who bounced back with a great exit on their next project though -- you know who you are, and you done good.

Initially hired for standard front-end duties, I moved on to writing and implementing front-end coding standards and led a project to address technical debt in the codebase.

I was employee #17, developer #4 and front-end dev #1 at Digg. Over my three years with the company, I worked on almost every piece of UI architecture related to Digg V3 and wrote the DUI JavaScript library to power it.By the time I left, I was handling code standards, best practices, and JavaScript architecture for a team of four front-end developers and more than twenty software engineers.A highlight from my time at Digg was being invited to speak at the jQuery Conference at MIT.

I built sites using JS and XSLT templates for an agency that ran on its own in-house enterprise Java CMS. It was unique in terms of workflow, and it was interesting to write Turing complete markup.I'm actually still proud of the fact that I wrote a drag-and-drop file manager that worked in IE6. Back then jQuery didn't exist yet and that skillset was called DHTML, and we all owe Dave Shea an eternal debt of gratitude for his early work on CSS Zen Garden.

Free rein in a warehouse full of wine was by far the best startup perk I've ever gotten.

When I was 17 I co-founded a small design studio next to a biker bar, then ran off to ride the first dotcom wave in a stuffy basement on Vancouver Island. Things only got weirder from there.