Phoenix, Arizona · 20 years shipping
Engineer for 20 years, CTO or founder for the last ten. I’ve taken products from zero to acquisition and grown engineering teams from one to ten.
01
I build the hard parts myself — netcode, renderers, serializers, even a working computer made of cellular automata.
02
Seven companies, two exits, one acquisition. Shipped a v1 in four days and scaled another past 100,000 members.
03
Grown engineering from one to ten, twice. I set the architecture, carry the pager, and still ship code every week.
github.com/dested
Every square is a day of commits. Ten years of startup work and side projects, all of it public.
13,754 contributions2,587 days with a push
Real contribution data from github.com/dested, fetched on the server and cached daily. Last synced 2026-08-09.
Companies
2023–now
The Clever model built for employers: healthcare benefits that cost less and are easier to understand. More than 100,000 members on the platform today.
2023
An LLM that stress-tests a business idea and returns a structured validation report. MVP in four days, revenue in the first week.
2021–now
A browser-based 3D multiplayer game engine that teaches kids to build games: WebGL and WebGPU rendering, Monaco for students writing code and Blockly for those starting visually. Y Combinator W20.
2019–20
A matchmaker for couples: you and your partner matched with another couple. React Native on a serverless backend, built and launched single-handedly.
2018–23
Prescription savings applied at the pharmacy counter. I built the platform, the apps, and the engineering team from nothing, and stayed through the exit.
2016–19
Personalized nutrition across software and hardware: an app, a connected scale, and custom BLE hardware designed in-house. I grew engineering from one person to ten and shipped firmware and cloud services on the same schedule.
2015–16
Telemedicine before it was an established category. I owned the architecture and built the WebRTC video layer that connected patients to doctors.
Projects · 2006–2026
Featured · 2026gametool
The game-maker for the kid who outgrew ScratchJr.
Kids drag hand-painted stickers into a 3D paper world and snap real WHEN → DO rules onto them. Starts at 6, no wall at 10. Free on the App Store — and the whole studio runs in the browser.
2026tool
Claude in Chrome burns tokens, minutes, and sometimes the task. bx replaces it.
2025tool
Run thousands of customer interviews in minutes — with synthetic personas.
2021gametool
One engine, any deck: describe the rules and play card games online with friends.
2026gametool
A level-generation and agent competition on a deterministic, subpixel-accurate platformer engine.
2026game
The terminal dungeon crawler for engineers. Play while your code compiles.
2026game
Drag the dots until no two lines cross — faster than everyone else, while they wreck your board.
2017game
A faction war fought by everyone at once on a single shared hex map, resolved on a schedule with nothing running between turns.
2022game
A computer built from cellular automata, running in the browser. Four states and one rule, assembled into gates, registers, and a clock. JavaScript first, then WebASM, then WebGPU for higher cell counts.
2026gametool
Lua mods and scenarios, plus seven rendered mapshots of finished factories — 292 hours across five worlds, read straight from each save.
Writing · casualdeveloper.net
scriptc is Vercel Labs' TypeScript-to-native compiler. It takes TypeScript, emits LLVM IR, and links a real native binary — no Node, no V8, no JavaScript engine in the output. I'd seen it beat node on a toy benchmark and…
LLMs are great at React largely because of Tailwind — style and structure in one file. But Tailwind is verbose, and LLM output is priced and paced per token. So we were going to release Terse Tailwind: a mapping from…
After spending some time in TypeScript you may begin to crave type safety everywhere in your life. JavaScript is an inherently unsafe language and there are dragons to be found everywhere and in almost every framework.…
I’m looking for my next role — Principal or Staff IC, Director, or CTO. If you’re building something technically demanding, I’d like to hear about it.
sal@dested.com