I've been passionate about cars and deeply involved in the car community for over 30 years. The photo above is me with one of my Porsche-building idols, Magnus Walker, where I signed an illustration I created of one of his cars that now hangs in his gallery.
How did we get here?
I have been artistic since I could hold a pencil but it wasn't until high school where I discovered I was a little bit different from my other art majors. I excelled in mathematics and loved figuring out how computer software worked. I took a drafting class where they had just received computers with AutoCAD 10 (DOS). No one knew anything about it. Two of us decided we would figure it out and we did after several classes. At the end of grade 11 I decided I was not going to continue my art major and transferred back to my local high school to pursue architecture.
Education
I then studied architecture at Sheridan College and on my second co-op position I was asked to stay on after my college year was completed. The company at the time was called DISC Corp. where we did blueprint to AutoCAD conversion along with building/site surveys. In the first 2-3 years I traveled a lot and did on-site building surveys to AutoCAD for over a thousand locations. I have been in some very interesting buildings.
Work Experience
The company then got into facilities management as clients wanted more from their drawings. They hired a few developers and started building Vision/FM. Once we had a product up and running I began to learn how to develop input forms, database structures and reporting from our developers. I spent 17 years with them watching the product evolve along with the software industry. In 2013 the company was sold and that began a new beginning at FacilityTEAM with a few of the original people from Vision/FM.
It was a blank slate, we had wanted an online/cloud based product for years but it was almost impossible to do and this gave us a chance. I was the lead product designer and front end developer. We worked on weekly sprints where I'd spend a week designing then the following week I would develop what I had designed. At the time the project was all built using HTML, CSS and AngularJS. I believe we built an excellent product, it even had live asset management tracking but things unfortunately did not work out in the end.
Now scrambling to figure out what to do I called a friend who just happened to need help. A few years prior I had designed their company logo and his automotive company had taken off. I spent just over 3 months re-branding their website, shooting all their product photography and designing their packaging.
Moving Forward
I was now on the hunt for my next role and wanted to stay local, commuting over 2 hours a day is not ideal. I went to my first Communitech's Tech Jam where I learned about Hackernest and attended a few of those. I met a lot of people but wasn't getting any traction until one day I got a phone call from a recruiter. HockeyTech was looking for someone with my unique skill set. The funny part is I had bypassed them at Tech Jam since I was not into hockey. I have been with HockeyTech since 2015, which was acquired by FloSports in 2021.
What started as a hockey data and streaming platform has since grown into FloSports, one of the largest sports media companies in the world. In that time, my role has evolved from UI/UX developer to Principal Design Technologist, leading AI-native product development and building FloSports' first fully AI-built platform.