From $1M in revenue selling Pokémon Go services, to governing AI practices at a bank.

How AI is changing the software industry

Leveraging AI has become a cornerstone of my development philosophy. My expertise in software architecture and design principles enables me to use AI as a powerful accelerator, allowing me to write code in virtually any language and deliver solutions faster than ever. This shift means I have to focus more on the now most important high-impact activities: reading on the latest technologies and advancements, ensuring quality through meticulous code review and testing, and preemptively catching flawed or hallucinatory outputs by using harnesses in the form of skills, guardrails, hooks, and automated verification loops that keep agents on proven patterns and stop mistakes before they ship.

“90% of my skills just went to zero dollars and 10% of my skills went up 1000x. […] Having a vision, being able to set milestones towards that vision, keep track of a design to maintain levels or control the levels of complexity as you go forward; those are hugely leveraged skills now compared to ‘I know where to put the ampersands and the stars and the brackets in Rust’.”

Early Career

While completing my B.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, a roommate and I built a fully custom e-commerce platform that surpassed $1 million in revenue during its first year, well before Shopify became mainstream. We combined my video game bot-development skills with an ultra-simple user experience to gain a decisive competitive edge. Careful considerations eventually led us to shut the store down, but the project proved that, with enough determination and code, almost anything is possible.

Because we started without staff, I quickly picked up marketing, project management, hiring, and general business strategy alongside development. Over the next several years I ran my own ventures and consulted for niche companies in the game-botting space, sharpening both technical and business skills.

Working with partners who dealt exclusively in cryptocurrency sparked a deep interest in blockchain. I began automated trading and ultimately ended up project managing and presiding over a crypto casino.

Side note: During the 2020 pandemic I took a sabbatical to lead a World of Warcraft Classic guild: 40 players on voice, three nights a week, for 18 months. It remains one of my most intensive leadership experiences and taught me how to manage large online communities.

As my crypto reputation grew, I picked up advisory gigs, mentored at ETHGlobal Sydney, and secured a position as Technical Project Manager for a well-funded crypto project.

Now

I'm currently Tech Lead AI at Desjardins, where I innovate engineering practices to frame and govern AI-driven development across teams: defining guardrails, rulesets, and review standards for AI-assisted coding workflows.

Between jobs, I jumped into the 6-week Pyth Community Hackathon in its final week and shipped Ouroboros, an AI coding agent that turns a plain-English idea into a deployed, working Pyth dApp from a single chat window. It took 1st place and a 50,000 $PYTH award (X announcement).

Previously, I was Tech Lead AI at Angel Softwares, where I drove technical direction and mentored developers across AI product lines, building intelligent voice assistants and OCR-based automation tools with Python, TypeScript, and AWS.

Before that, I spent two years as a senior full-stack developer at a Canadian software water-treatment company, where stepping back from high-level decision-making to dive deep into code let me master enterprise-grade practices:

• Designing and maintaining robust CI/CD pipelines
• Implementing comprehensive automated testing suites
• Enforcing disciplined version control and release processes
• Building microservices to offload heavy tasks and reduce network load
• Contributing to TypeScript migration initiatives as a lead developer refactoring our Vue frontend application

That technical depth now fuels my work governing AI in real-world products.

Random

On a more personal level, I believe differentiation is key. Driven by passion, I've spent years building expertise in several niche technological fields that come handy from time to time:

• Video Game Hacking: Memory injection/hooking via DLL.
• Android Hacking & Automation: MITM attacks, custom ROMs to bypass security, and custom-built automation bots.
• Video Game Modding: Custom maps and mods.
• Operating Systems: Deep experimentation with Debian-based and Windows environments.
• Payment Integration: Extensive experience with Stripe, PayPal, eBay, Crypto (web3), and FastSpring.

I've been in front of a computer since I was five, and as a result, my passion has led me down many paths, giving me a uniquely vast and diversified technical background.

The “idea guy” OpenAI Sam Altman describes in “The Gentle Singularity”; that's me. Instead of waiting for someone else to execute, I forced myself to learn software engineering and development from the basics so I could turn ideas into reality. As AI lowers the barrier to implementation, that blend of instinctive, out-of-the-box thinking and hard-earned technical skills has become my competitive edge.