Shawn Mervin

A working timeline

Thirty-eight years from a PCjr to a lending platform. The tools on this line have turned over completely more than once; the habit of learning the next one has not.

Drag the rail, scroll it sideways, or use the arrow keys. Newest is at the right.

Milestones, earliest to most recent

  1. 1986
    the start

    An IBM PCjr, and BASIC

    My first computer. I learned to code on it in BASIC, self-taught, at nine years into the personal-computer era. Everything after this was learned the same way.

  2. 1995
    work

    First independent contracts

    Started taking paid work through my own numbered company — the self-employed thread that has run alongside every job since.

  3. 1996
    the web, early

    A website in the Province

    Built a site to promote my basketball, and it ran in the Vancouver Province. A personal website getting newspaper column inches in 1996 tells you how early this was — most businesses did not have one yet.

  4. 1996
    work

    IBM Canada

    Joined IBM Canada on project delivery and customer environments, with their internal training behind it. The enterprise grounding under everything since.

  5. 1999
    learning

    Taught myself PHP

    While still at IBM, because I wanted to build things that were mine. The first of many stacks learned off nobody’s course.

  6. 2001
    work

    NexInnovations

    Systems specialist — IT and computer services.

  7. 2003
    craft

    Game art and animation

    A Masters program at the Art Institute of Vancouver, 2003–2005: the full game pipeline, character design through Maya and Unreal, ActionScript alongside it. The reason the screens tend to be legible.

  8. 2006
    work

    Marsh Canada

    Developer and designer at the insurance brokerage.

  9. 2007
    shipped

    Experience Engines

    Flash showroom touchscreens for luxury property, at B3 Communications — interactive site plans and view studies that ran on kiosks. Several still run today, through a self-hosted emulator.

  10. 2008
    shipped

    Super Sonic

    The equipment-rental ERP I built and still run, now a white-label product for other yards. Fifteen years of operations encoded in one system, never with a maintenance window. Alongside it, application and network work for Metal Mountain Resources.

  11. 2015
    shipped

    Brikers

    Technology lead for a heavy-machinery parts dealer: ERP, CRM, and around 2016 conversational call routing on Twilio Autopilot, when making a machine hold a conversation was real work.

  12. 2020
    now

    Modernising underneath a running business

    The Super Sonic legacy application, a React web app, and a React Native field app all running the same operations in parallel — replaced screen by screen, with no downtime, while 1.4 million rows of audit trail keep reconciling.

  13. 2024
    now

    Lend Pilot

    A private-lending platform: deterministic B-20 qualification, a tokenised client portal, and a model doing document extraction where a human checks the output. The current stack — Node, Postgres, React Native, AWS.

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