The Journey Behind Shutter Speed Apps

Military Foundation

1995-2003

C-130 Combat Flight Engineer, U.S. Air Force. In Bosnia's bitter chill and Iraq's dusty chaos, calibrating turboprops and monitoring hydraulic systems at 20,000 feet. Where precision under fire became second nature, and one misread gauge could cost lives.

Early Code

2003-2006

Self-Taught Developer. Started with a Commodore 64 in 1982, typing BASIC programs while my brother jumped off beds. By military service, I was running Linux servers and hosting Quake tournaments. Fresh out of uniform, I authored two books that taught thousands to build web applications.

Cloud Pioneer

2006-2015

Playlist.com Infrastructure Architect. Designed and operated one of the web's earliest "cloud" services using OpenVZ, LVS load balancers, MySQL replication clusters, and custom CDNs. 1,500 servers, 135M users. While VCs wrote checks ($26M in funding), we toiled in a Kissimmee data center, scaling for viral traffic spikes.

Enterprise Scale

2015-2023

Tech Lead at Echelon Fitness during $100M+ funding round. Architected subscription platforms, multi-currency billing, GDPR/CCPA compliance, and high-availability live-streaming. During pandemic "Black Friday every day," deployed weekly feature releases under massive load.

Creative Vision

2023-Present

Founded Shutter Speed Apps. After years of building invisible backend frameworks for others, longed to create something tangible. Obsession with light-painting and time-lapse collided with two decades of engineering excellence, sparking TimeLapsed and our growing portfolio.