Show, don’t tell.

I'm Brett, a technical pre-sales leader with 8+ years in enterprise solutions at Shopify, Collaborative Robotics and Clearpath. I learn best when building, to understand technologies with a deeper conviction than just reading documentation. With AI this has become impossibly easy, and impossibly fun. These are some of the things I've made.

North Vancouver · --:-- Press ?

Selected work

Andromeda

Listening to turbopuffer's co-founder describe vectors as points in space, I pictured stars. So I drew them: everything about turbopuffer and vector search as a night sky, where you can watch your question land.

Next.jsturbopufferVoyage AIClaudethree.js

DempIn

My wife and I used to reconcile a month of receipts by hand. Now this Android app reads my bank alerts and receipts, sorts them my way, and works out who owes whom.

KotlinJetpack ComposeRoomClaude

This site

A place to show what I've built, and have some fun doing it. There's a 3D animal you can dress up that answers questions about me out loud, and a few things hidden around.

VercelClaudeElevenLabsUpstash Redisthree.js

How I build

Straight to the fun part

I spent a lot of time learning to code and got just dangerous enough. What wore me out was the plumbing: updating packages and wiring up infrastructure before I ever got to the fun stuff. With AI I go straight to the fun stuff. It's creativity all the time.

For exampleThis site went from nothing to a working first version in a day, talking 3D guide included. The day went on ideas, not setup.

I argue with it

I'm a challenger. I poke holes in what AI gives me, think things through from first principles, and get into a debate with it. I have it play different roles and steelman its own work. Claude writes most of the code, and I make the calls.

For exampleFor this site, I had Claude critique it the way a friend of mine who's a front-end developer would. That critique is why it now loads faster, works with a keyboard, and has a strict security policy.

Ship it properly

Small pull requests, tests on the parts that matter, and CI that won't merge anything that fails. If an app holds real data, it gets real releases.

For exampleDempIn holds my actual budget. It has 14 merged pull requests, unit tests on all the money math, CI on every change, and signed releases built from a version tag.

Where I've been

Tap a role for the story, or a year for a fun fact.

A key customer gave us six weeks to hit a set of success metrics or take our robots out of their facility. Remote teleoperation was one of those metrics.

I owned the teleoperation roadmap: what had to ship and in what order, how we'd measure success, and the enablement docs so field and support teams could run it on site.

ImpactWe met the bar and kept the account.

Day to day, I run technical sales cycles with engineering and operations leaders deciding on multi-million-dollar automation projects, and I redesigned how we run those engagements.

What I tell people about from seven years at Shopify is the people, how solid the culture is, and how strong the product is. Shopify is a masterclass in product.

My job was owning the technical win on complex enterprise deals, including a merchant doing $1.2B in GMV. That meant working with customer engineering teams at the API level on how checkout, payments, ERP, OMS and WMS fit together for global merchants, and running roadmap sessions with Shopify's product and engineering teams to close the gaps.

ImpactIn 2023 I captured 60% of my vertical's revenue on a team of five, and I closed 135% of my annual quota by Q2 2024.

Seven years, from Launch Engineer to Staff, including warehouse robotics at 6 River Systems. Awards: '22 Peak Performer, Q2 '22 SE of the Quarter, '22 "Deep Diver".

I founded the Project Engineer team at OTTO Motors and led deployments of autonomous mobile robots into industrial sites.

I worked with engineering and customers to turn real-world workflows into how the robots behaved, and contributed to the solution architecture: ROS-based control software, middleware, and WMS and ERP integration.

I didn't realize at the time how incredible our robot stack was. We were doing so much with so little: no GPUs, just CPUs, and two 2D LiDARs, and the robots navigated warehouses on their own.

Impact"Customers First" and "Move Fast" awards for speeding up delivery.

A Bachelor of Engineering with distinction and honours, earned while rowing on the varsity team.

Rowing is where I really found myself. I found out I could work hard and be disciplined, learn something new, challenge myself and commit to it. I have a lot of great memories from that team.

Impact12 awards for leadership and excellence in varsity athletics.

Since then: a Project Management Diploma (Conestoga College, 2018) and Negotiation Mastery (Harvard Business School Online, 2024).

Contact

Reach out about
anything, really. Say hi.

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