The Accidental Beginning

I moved to Winnipeg for a VFX job before I even had a signed contract.
On day one, I was handed Jos Stam's stable fluids paper and told to build a fluid solver.
I had a working 2D version in three days and a 3D solver within five months.
That work ended up shipping in productions like Scooby Doo 2 and The Core.

The key pattern started early: solve a hard technical problem well, then look for the larger opportunity hidden inside it.

First Pivot: Personal Tool to Industry Standard

Fluid simulations took days, so I built a distributed scheduler to use idle machines around the office.
The studio had a bigger pain: unreliable render management on a 60-machine farm.
We repurposed the same core idea into Deadline, a robust render manager built for reliability.
Blizzard became an early external customer, and the product later spread across hundreds of major productions.
Deadline was eventually acquired by Amazon.