About

👋 Hey there!

I’m Tyler Young.

I’m a product-focused developer who likes creating things that makes people’s lives better. I’ve spent more than a decade in software working on soft-real time systems, including collaborative mapmaking, game dev, video streaming, and IoT command-and-control systems.

Today, I’m building a new take on website monitoring called SleepEasy and doing contracting & consulting on the side. I blog about the behind-the-scenes stuff (tech choices, marketing, customer development, and more) in the #BuildInPublic category here.

In the past, I’ve been fortunate to work on a handful of other interesting projects:

  • Felt, an outrageously powerful tool for making maps on the internet. Our tech stack was Elixir, React, and Postgres, deployed on Render.
  • CBTea, a Phoenix LiveView app that acts as a journal for a core exercise in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). See the announcement post here.
  • Symphony, a SaaS made by Generac Grid Services (née Enbala) that helps energy utilities balance electricity production against demand. This was an Elixir back-end communicating with an Elm (❤️) front-end over GraphQL.
  • Duet, an app that turns iPads and other mobile devices into extra monitors for your computer.
  • The X-Plane flight simulator. Among other things, I was solely responsible for the massive multiplayer implementation (both client- and server-side) that we shipped in 2020 on the mobile app. I was also responsible for the UI rewrite we did for X-Plane 11 on the desktop, and I’ve worked on various pieces of the low-level platform integration (we run on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android).
  • A Mac photo browser called Unbound. When I took it over from the previous dev, it was in rough shape—it crashed if you looked at it wrong, it failed to display images correctly, and the marketing failed to explain why you would want to use the app. I spent a few months overhauling the marketing and fixing bugs, then finally started shipping new features. I also started transitioning the Objective-C codebase to Swift (and SwiftUI, where appropriate).

You can download my resume as a PDF, or find me on Twitter @TylerAYoung. I’m also on Mastodon @tylerayoung@fosstodon.org.