Engineer for twenty years, CTO or founder for the last ten. Two exits as a cofounder, a $180M acquisition as VP of Architecture, and engineering teams grown from one to ten — twice.
01
A lifelong builder who believes code is art.
02
Seven startups, two exits as cofounder.
03
Grew engineering from 0 to scale, twice.
Selected work
01 · 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.
02 · 2019game
A multiplayer space shooter with netcode written from scratch.
Enter a callsign, hit launch, and you are in a live arena with everyone else online. Underneath is the hard part, all hand-rolled: the client predicts, the server reconciles, and the wire carries packed binary state instead of JSON — rollback keeps play smooth on bad connections.
03 · 2012gametool
Sonic 3 & Knuckles, reverse-engineered into a browser engine and level editor.
I pulled the tile, chunk, and collision formats out of the original ROM and rebuilt the physics to match the source material, frame for frame. The editor loads real level data, lets you rearrange chunks, and plays the result immediately. It started as a question about how the collision heightmaps worked.
04 · 2016game
A working computer built from cellular automata, in the browser.
Four states and one rule, assembled into gates, registers, and a clock — a computer you can watch compute, cell by cell. Written three times: JavaScript, then WebASM, then WebGPU, each rewrite buying another order of magnitude of cells.
05 · 2026tool
Browser automation built for coding agents — text instead of pixels.
The screenshot loop sends a frontier model a 1,600-token image to find one button, and still loses the thread. bx is a CLI over real Chrome with exactly one user in mind: a coding agent. Distilled text instead of pixels, hard token budgets at the source — and a path that works becomes a typed flow that never needs a model again.
06 · 2025gameapp
The golf-trip scorekeeper: handicaps, side games, and who owes what.
Your group already plays for something. Sneakies gets it right — net scores off every handicap, greenies and sneakies and sandies counted hole by hole, bridges doubled, and a running ledger of exactly who owes what. And it remembers the round forever, even after four transfusions, eight beers and two hot dogs.
github.com/dested
Every square is a day of commits. Ten years of startup work and side projects, all of it public.
13,940 contributions2,603 days with a push
Real contribution data from github.com/dested, fetched on the server and cached daily. Last synced 2026-09-02.
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.
2021–25
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
My first CTO role. Personalized nutrition across software and hardware: an app, a connected scale, and custom BLE hardware designed in-house. I grew engineering from one to ten and shipped firmware and cloud services on the same schedule. The company lives on today as DYPER.
2015–16
Telemedicine before it was an established category. I owned the architecture and built the WebRTC video layer that connected patients to doctors.
The catalog · 2012–2026
The game-maker for the kid who outgrew ScratchJr.
Browser automation built for coding agents — text instead of pixels.
Debug and review your app in your own words.
A platformer engine so deterministic you can compete on it.
The gallery for AI-built games, toys, and beautiful garbage.
A procedurally generated speedrun platformer — a new world every seed.
A terminal dungeon crawler. Play while your code compiles.
Drag dots until no lines cross — while rivals wreck your board.
Claude speedruns Super Mario Bros from raw screenshots.
Lua mods, custom scenarios, and mapshots from 292 hours of factories.
git push → TLS, DNS, rolling deploy, logs. One $30 ARM box.
The golf-trip scorekeeper: handicaps, side games, and who owes what.
A thousand synthetic customer interviews before lunch.
Most days disappear. Chirptime keeps them.
One 15-minute conversation a day with four real people.
Sixty AI outfit renders from one photo of you.
Describe the rules; the engine deals, enforces, and syncs every seat.
Twitch chat becomes a bingo card the whole stream plays at once.
TypeScript types in, ArrayBuffers out — the wire format under Orbital.
A multiplayer space shooter with netcode written from scratch.
A faction war on one shared hex map — fully serverless.
An ice-sliding puzzler where every board proves exactly one path exists.
A working computer built from cellular automata, in the browser.
Falling blocks scored on a bingo card instead of a line.
One Tetris board for all of Twitter: whoever tweets next moves the piece.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles, reverse-engineered into a browser engine and level editor.
I’m the CTO of Clever Benefits, and I ship something new most weeks. If you’re building something technically demanding — or you just want to talk netcode, infra, or TypeScript — say hi.
sal@dested.com2015
Falling blocks scored on a bingo card instead of a line.
Falling blocks scored on a bingo card: clear the pattern on your card rather than the line in front of you, which combines line clearing with pattern completion.