— Hi! I'm —
BRIAN BUGH
— I am a —
Systems Engineer and Educator
with 20 years of programming professionally in web and games
and 3 years professionally teaching and mentoring.
I specialize in inspiring leadership, building the foundation for platforms and teams, robust user-driven product designs, and teaching.
— and —
I love to solve impossible problems.
Cutting edge web, games, VR, robotic space mining, biotech, microfinance, embedded devices, energy hacking, or something entirely new. If they think it can't be done, I want to be the one to try.
Special Skills
Data/Resources
From data big to small. I love data and everything to do with it: manipulation, allocation, design. "Data" includes memory and assets and any other resources. Heaven for me will be massive data sets.
Interfaces
Client APIs, programmer APIs, human-usable interfaces, etc. Anything where one thing connects to another. I specialize in creating human-usable interfaces whether it is downstream customers or other programmers.
Foundations
The best place for me is creating the foundation for everyone else to build on. Game engines, web platforms, data models, product designs, etc. This is where I am strongest as a developer.
Leadership
I have led many teams of creative people, programmers and artists and others. Excellent people are passionate about what they do, and work best when they are happy and empowered. I love enabling others to excel.
Career Highlights
20 years production programming
Overall, 23 years of programming. 15 years in web and 5 in games.
Some of the earliest e-commerce web sites ever to come online
Before there were libraries for credit card processing and Stripe and security and Heroku, there were hand-written e-commerce and custom shopping carts in PHP. One of those businesses is still actively successful today, thanks to this work.
Extensive development on 5 game engines; two mostly written by me
I have worked extensively on many AAA-level game engines. Two of them were largely written by me: a near-complete Xbox 360 rewrite of the idTech 3 engine, and an ActionScript 3 game engine built from a heavily modified IsoEngine. Unity Experience.
11 years of team leadership
I have been a project and team leader on many different projects. People love to work for me.
11 startups as an early stage developer
In addition to years of experience as a corporate consultant, I have experience being one of the earliest technical members of many teams. I have been through every kind of ringer imaginable and always came out ahead.
Solved many exciting and challenging tech problems
Over my long career I have solved many great problems in unique ways. See my full technical resume for more details about them.
Primary Technologies
10-20 years of production use
Ruby
My hobby for learning obscure languages paid off when I was already actively using Ruby when Rails debuted.
Rails
We scoff now, but rails generate scaffold was a revolution in 2004.
HTML
The day HoTMetaL Pro added support for HTML 3.2 <font> tags was like Christmas...
CSS
...and when CSS caused the death of the <font> tag years later, we were thankful.
JavaScript
JavaScript was just a fancy way of making rollovers and drop downs 15 years ago.
ActionScript
I used Flash before it had ActionScript, and although the web has left it behind, game engines make heavy use of it.
Git/SCM
I wrote my first SCM in BATCH, then upgraded to CVS, SVN, SVK, and now Git.
Photoshop
Photoshop didn't have layers when I first started using it. Now it can do anything!
Contact me!
Are you a funded startup or mid-sized companies solving exciting problems?
Contact me!
Also available for contract mentoring and business advising.