Pete founded Unspace in 2004 with two friends after too many years building complex systems for the financial industry. The goal was simple: work hard on interesting projects with smart people without sacrificing happiness or dignity. Unspace also marked Pete's transition from
proprietary Microsoft development to becoming one of the first adopters of Ruby on Rails. He was the curator of the RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences, and hosts the popular monthly “Rails Pub Nite” developer event — of which there has been over 50 to date. An avid traveler and
occasional touring rock drummer, Pete is passionate about music and film photography. He recently co-founded BuzzData, a data publishing and collaboration hub.
Meghann Millard started her career in the badlands of the Canadian music industry, quickly amassing experience during stints as publicist, promoter, and artist manager. Upon encountering some lively characters at a freshly-minted development firm — and denoting that web consultancies functioned like bands — she began adeptly applying her hard-earned hat collection to the realm of tech as finance, operations, events,
marketing and general empress of Unspace. A master facilitator, Meghann thrives when inventing environments and scenarios where people can tap into their reserves of creativity, allowing them to connect and collaborate more deeply with one another. Recent examples include the seminal RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences, Changecamp, the Ruby Job Fair and the Technologic speaker series. In her spare
time, she does the same thing: orchestrating marketing initiatives and events for beloved labels and charities, nurturing friends' creative pet projects and throwing lavish parties to celebrate the people she loves. She's a bookworm, writer and photographer, and spends her idle time carefully planning her travel journeys and record purchases (then subsequently justifying them to her accountant.)
Mike McCann is a recovering entertainment industry professional with more than 15 years experience planning, executing and managing numerous creative multimedia properties across several verticals, both online and in the wireless space. Mike created and oversaw Yahoo! Canada's
media and entertainment properties at the height of the portal wars, and also built and managed the content in Canada's #2 digital music store for Telus (we all know who #1 is). He's as comfortable creating use cases and product roadmaps or overseeing rigorous QA as he is making boardroom
pitches to clients and managing ongoing outward-facing relationships. In his spare (ha!) time, he's a DJ and general music nerd of the highest order, a devoted Vancouver Canucks fan and an obscenely proud dad to his two-year-old son Riley.
Known for his honest approach in dealing with clients, Nathan Athay brings close to two decades of far-reaching sales and business development experience to
Unspace. His areas of expertise include Accounting and CRM software, Knowledge & Content Management software and RFID technology. He welcomes the opportunity to
help people execute creative solutions to their problems. Nathan enjoys listening to and playing music, and is an accomplished abstract artist.
Reg Braithwaite is a software developer and development manager with more than twenty years of professional experience. In addition to his work as a team lead, he consults and delivers buzzword-free
workshops on software development for teams. He recently led a team developing and maintaining the on-line service offering — in partnership with an internal team — of one of the world's largest financial
organizations. Reg Braithwaite speaks at users' group meetings and conferences like MeshU, StackOverflow DevDays, Microsoft TechDays, RubyFringe and the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference.
Carsten Nielsen's working life began in a metal fabrication shop, apprenticing to be a welder-fitter while moonlighting on web projects. He parlayed the hobby into a fulfilling career, and as Unspace's resident software maker he enjoys getting his hands
on everything from design to systems administration. He's most prominently known for his LCBO API project which allows anyone to access the LCBO's store and product information. It handles tens-of-thousands of requests a day, helping people
find wine and beer from their mobile devices. Carsten is an avid cyclist, amateur DJ, and connoisseur of all things beer and BBQ (especially together!)
Jamie Gilgen loves to write code and has been doing so professionally for the past 8 years. After completing a degree in Computer Engineering she spent five years at IBM working on various teams under the DB2 umbrella. Realizing that there
were exciting things happening in the world, she decided to explore and found herself at Unspace where she tries to bring order to the universe. Jamie is passionate about learning and recently completed a second degree in Chemistry. While working on this degree
she developed fauxflash to try to make memorization of information a little easier. In her spare time she loves to race cyclocross and play violin.
Justin Giancola started programming professionally shortly after vowing he would never write software under any circumstances. He spent his formative programming years building backend systems for FreshBooks and pursuing his
clandestine relationship with Lisp. Not content with sleeping adequately Justin co-founded Guestlist which he continues to actively develop to this day. Justin works most effectively on projects where he can help to make systems more simple, more
correct and more reliable. Justin has a penchant for antique motorcycles, and despite his best efforts has made no headway in curbing his habit for acquiring esoteric programming languages.
Before arriving at Unspace in 2012, Kevin Branigan built MyTTC from the ground up. Born out of a desire for free, convenient access to transit information, the application was developed using comprehensive service summaries that track each route in the city, eschewing the incomplete and inaccurate official schedules online. MyTTC offers travel plans that determine the optimal routes to take between any two points in the city, including moves between buses, streetcars
and subways. Toronto was used as a proof
of concept, but the proprietary Iroquois
routing engine behind the MyTTC trip
planner can be integrated with most transit
systems' data to provide commuters and
tourists with more reliable information over
the web or through SMS/Instant Messaging
technology on wireless devices.
Prior to MyTTC, Kevin dallied in the world
of electronics — designing and building model
helicopters (from scratch), controlling traffic
lights and developing electronic boards to replace his college's curriculum for teaching USB, PCI, RF and CPLDs. With that hardware experience Kevin has a unique perspective when approaching web development problems, allowing him to see past web standards and program in the languages that all the other languages are written in to extract true performance.
Shawn Allison designs and implements front-end code for web applications. A major proponent of the popular Haml and Sass markup languages, he believes both visual
design and the code behind it should be beautiful. Working with Unspace for over 3 years, he's contributed to many of their major projects including Canadian Tire,
Eric Taylor is enamoured with ideas. Sharing them and actualizing them is what he is all about. This keeps him involved with a couple projects at a time. In fact, he's spent
most of his life mucking about in arts and media. Presently he's been keeping his hands dirty as the Unspace office manager roustabout. He also produces a multiple
award winning web series called Out With Dad. In his spare time he makes up stories and shamelessly brags about his polyamourous book affairs.