Builder of small worlds,
shipper of useful things.
I'm James, a product engineer based in Toronto. Hockey nerd, gamer, weekend game designer, and reluctant operations guy. This is where I keep my side quests.
Currently
- Building Hearth, a homeowner OS for warranties, filters, maintenance, and everything you forget you own.
- Designing BRAISED, a 2D survival game where a brazier is your lifeline. Weekend project, real love.
- Tracking Fantasy hockey playoff projections. The math says my second-rounder is doomed. We'll see.
- Watching Re-running Battlestar Galactica for the nth time. So say we all.
- Walking Chase, mostly. He's a very good boy.
- Avoiding Anything written in Visual Basic. // I hate Visual Basic
Side Quests
Field Notes
// notes coming soon.
Pixels
Where I do the work that pays for the side quests.
I'm a product engineer in Toronto with close to a decade of building data-powered things. Mostly that means digging into messy workflows, finding the gaps, and turning half-formed ideas into something clear that actually ships. Off the clock I'm a hockey nerd, a gamer, and a weekend game designer who keeps starting side quests.
Where I've Been
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recent
ResQ
At ResQ I build Websites, part of the Growth Hub. It's an AI-powered site builder that gets local trades a real web presence without making them touch code, with AI-enhanced Google Ads and growth tools baked in so getting found comes standard instead of as an upsell. Most of these are small shops that could never justify an agency, so the work is really about handing them the kind of online presence that used to be out of reach. My end is the UX and the front-end build, and the edge cases that decide whether it feels solid or flimsy.
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before that
Valnet
Analytics, ad tech, and CMS performance work. The kind of engineering that's invisible when it's working and very visible when it isn't. I co-led Sentinel, an analytics platform built to stay accurate under ad blockers without crossing compliance lines, refactored the core ad-serving architecture, and spent a fair amount of time being the translator between ad ops and engineering. Net of it: conversions up 14%, load times down by a third.
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before that
Rain43
Client delivery for a mixed bag of projects: XBOX, Joseph Brant Hospital, the Alberta Securities Commission. Built front-to-back, single-page apps to custom CMS work, owning both the quality and the strategy. I also ran a small engineering team here: the 1:1s, the performance reviews, the career conversations, plus a chunk of the hiring. First time I really learned that shipping and growing people are the same job wearing different hats.
What I'm Good At
Things worth keeping.
A private shelf. Articles, essays, and rabbit holes I've found and want to keep. Not curated for anyone but me.