Phoenix, Arizona · 20 years shipping
I build hard thingsand ship them.
Engineer for 20 years, CTO or founder for the last ten. Zero to acquisition, teams from one to ten, products with 100,000+ people on them.
Nights and weekends it’s netcode, renderers, and serializers — the systems work is the part I actually love.
The engineer
I build the hard parts myself — netcode, renderers, serializers, a working computer made of cellular automata. When there’s no library for it, that’s the part I want.
The founder
Seven companies, two exits, one acquisition. I’ve shipped a v1 in four days and scaled another to 100,000+ members.
The CTO
Grown engineering from one to ten, twice. I set the architecture, carry the pager, and still ship code every week.
github.com/dested
Ten years of commits. Twenty years of engineering.
Every square is a day of commits. Ten years of startup work and side projects, all of it public.
13,625 contributions2,581 days with a pushlongest streak 34 daysbusiest day 127 on 2026-07-27
Real contribution data from github.com/dested, fetched on the server and cached daily. Last synced 2026-08-02.
LessMore
Companies
Seven companies. Two exits.
2023–now
Clever Benefits CTO & cofounder
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.
Current100,000+ members2023
DimeADozen.AI Founder
An LLM that stress-tests a business idea and returns a structured validation report. MVP in four days, revenue in the first week.
Exited40,000+ reportsMVP in 4 days2021–24
QuickGa.me Founder
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 applicant.
Lives on as GameCreatorsClub.com2019–20
DoubleDates Founder
A matchmaker for couples: you and your partner matched with another couple. React Native on a serverless backend, built and launched single-handedly.
Shut down2018–23
Clever Rx / Clever Health CTO & cofounder
Prescription savings applied at the pharmacy counter. I built the platform, the apps, and the engineering team from nothing, and stayed through the exit.
Exited2016–19
STYR Labs CTO
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.
Hardware + platform shippedEng 1 → 102015–16
HealthiestYou VP, Architecture
Telemedicine before it was an established category. I owned the architecture and built the WebRTC video layer that connected patients to doctors.
Acquired by Teladoc · $180M
Projects
Engines, games, and infrastructure.
2026
Untangleuntangle.gg
Drag the dots until no two lines cross — faster than everyone else, while they wreck your board.
2026
Shellquestshellquest.dested.com
The terminal dungeon crawler for engineers. Play while your code compiles.
2026
Subpixelsubpixel.dested.com
A level-generation and agent competition on a deterministic, subpixel-accurate platformer engine.
2026
Factorio Toolsfactorio.dested.com
Lua mods and scenarios, plus seven rendered mapshots of finished factories — 292 hours across five worlds, read straight from each save.
2021
AnyCardGameanycardgame.dested.com
One engine, any deck: describe the rules and play card games online with friends.
2020
Emote.Bingoemote.bingo
A Twitch extension that turns chat emotes into a bingo card the whole stream plays at once.
2018
Social War Gamessocialwargames.com
A faction war fought by everyone at once on a single shared hex map, resolved on a schedule with nothing running between turns.
live · wireworld rules
2016
Wireworld Automatawireworld.dested.com
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.
2012
Oursonicoursonic.org
A Genesis-faithful Sonic engine and level editor in the browser. I reverse-engineered the original ROM’s tile, chunk, and collision formats and rebuilt the physics to match the source material.
Writing · casualdeveloper.net
Recent writing.
Vercel's TypeScript Compiler Beats WebAssembly
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…
Terse Tailwind for LLMs
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…
Advanced TypeScript Type Tricks
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.…
Let’s talk.
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.comDownload resume ↓Phoenix, AZ · remote friendly