Hi, I’m Brennan. I build innovative digital products people love.

Over the past 12 years, I've built web-based tools for non-profits, art collectors, bike shares, e-commerce companies. Some examples:

Kelp Your information filtration system. Kelp serves you relevant documents and webpages when you need them.
Cityblock Health I was a founding team member helping build a scalable solution to address the root causes of health for underserved urban populations. I ran the engineering team.
Motivate I lead the engineering team through first successful PCI compliance for Citi Bike. I also managed all in-house and contractor software development for the ~10 bike shares Motivate ran around the world.
Vislet A set of small interactive visualizations to help us understand the cities we live in.
Artsy I was responsible for making sure Artsy’s public facing web presence is fast and maintainable and that out custom built tools for live events such as art fairs and auction worked well.

Selected Writing

Buying and selling an apartment in Brooklyn

Sep 10, 2021

Is buying in Brooklyn worth it?

What is it like to buy, renovate and sell an apartment in NYC? The stories I read about apartment ownership were either crude financial analysis or clean NYT real estate fluff. My story is neither.

How to build trust and foster high impact teams

Aug 16, 2021

How to build trust and foster high impact teams

The type of process you employ on your team is a function of the trust between members of your team. This post looks at how to build trust and grow the team from a chaotic 'no trust' environment to an impactful 'deep trust' team.

What does working at a successful startup look like financially?

Jul 16, 2021

What does working at a successful startup look like financially?

or…how it cost me $1,000,000 to sell startup shares on the secondary market.

Guide to Engineering Ladder Communication

May 26, 2021

Guide to Engineering Ladder Communication

A good ladder is not one that looks good, but one used by your team and trusted by the org as a whole. How do you make sure your ladder gets used and has support?

Learning from a hyper growth startup

May 18, 2021

Learning from a hyper growth startup

This is a short set of lessons about managing your team, managing up and most importantly - managing yourself.

How we beat the Shopify 100 variant limit

Feb 13, 2017

How we beat the Shopify 100 variant limit

This post outlines a responsible way for developers to get around the Shopify 100 variant limit, and to understand the tradeoffs enough to sell the feature to clients.

Learning from Artsy: How to hire awesome engineers

Aug 1, 2016

Learning from Artsy: How to hire awesome engineers

Finding smart, motivated people who work well together is virtually impossible. If Artsy has a secret sauce, it is how it hires. All else falls from the assumption that they have hired the best people who want to work together to achieve Artsy’s mission.

Debugging a live Saturn V

Jan 11, 2015

Debugging a live Saturn V

We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.