It's 2017, and I am a Senior Software developer working on electronic health record projects for a provincial government in Canada. It's a great job, interesting, I love my coworkers, and in nineteen years, I can retire with a full pension at fifty-five. For my brain, one that prioritizes security and stability, the pension side of things is a dream come true and hard to find in private industry. Still, for my creative/self-actualization side, the idea of working out the rest of my career in the government seems too small and too predictable.

It's around this time that I’m introduced to the founders of Delta 9 Cannabis, the first licensed medical producer of Cannabis in my province. Cannabis is about to become legal federally across Canada. I knew of Delta 9 by name, and many of these companies were going public on the stock market to fund their expansion to meet the demands of legalization. Delta 9 offered me an opportunity to join their c-suite as their Chief Technology Officer. My initial mandate was the digital transformation of all existing systems and processes—everything from the computers, security, networking, disaster recovery planning, and cultivation software—to ecommerce and brick-and-mortar point of sales (POS) software. 

The next four years were my career's most exciting and challenging. The part I'll focus on next is ecommerce and POS, which is how I met Mechanic. I chose Shopify as our software provider for ecommerce and POS for omnichannel experience between online and in-store and the speed at which we could roll things out and support them with a lean team. By the time four years had passed, we had opened seventeen stores (they are now at over thirty-five stores), and we had a robust ecommerce presence with click-and-collect from all stores and offering delivery in less than two hours. We were the first company to legally deliver Cannabis in my province, and on the first night of legalization, we received 700 orders which completely overwhelmed our delivery partner. This meant our entire executive team, including myself, were delivering orders—even my dad and brother were delivering orders to get through our backlog.

Shortly after legalization night, I realized that to thrive on Shopify, we would need some apps to enhance the platform. Shopify provides an incredible core, but they leave space for apps to solve some challenges. I met Mechanic while trying to solve a challenge: a Shopify partner had created a custom app to produce inventory feeds of the products available at each of our brick-and-mortar stores, but the app wasn't performing well. That's when I learned about Mechanic, an app on the Shopify app store that was in many ways, more than an app. There was a library of 300+ pre-written automations and an entire programming language for creating brand-new automations. Mechanic meant we could re-develop our inventory feed functionality for a fraction of the cost, and it would work better than our existing custom app.

Around this time, I met Isaac through app support, we became friends, and I learned the values that make up Lightward. I tried to pay Isaac to write the automations that I needed, and he wouldn't for any amount—for him, it was about sustainability, and he had learned it wasn't sustainable to be the caretaker of custom code. He encouraged me to learn in a sort of Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-san relationship. The more I learned, the more I fell in love with Mechanic. I am forever grateful that Isaac taught me to fish rather than him prioritizing money over sustainable growth. Eventually, I met Brad from Tekhaus, who I began to hire to write custom automations for Delta 9. Brad and I developed a complex click-and-collect solution built on top of Shopify using Mechanic and some custom theme code. Our solution was emulated by many other companies using far more complex and expensive technologies. To this day, our solution still works well, it has been relatively inexpensive, and there has been zero downtime on the Mechanic side of things.

Over a couple of years, and in the middle of the pandemic, Isaac and I kept in touch. I was an active participant in our Mechanic community Slack workspace. Isaac approached me and asked if I would want to work on and help grow Mechanic. In my heart, I did, but I needed to weigh things with my wife Megan. We had newborn twin daughters, and I'd be walking away from a solid job. In the end, I made the best decision of my career: I joined Lightward and have never looked back. We've grown Mechanic in feature set, tripled our revenue, doubled our user base, and I'm in the best physical and mental shape I've been in for as long as I can remember. 

I am writing this after our team retreat in Palm Desert and Los Angeles. As a fully remote company, we have retreats twice a year where we can connect in person on important topics, but primarily just for fun and play. I always come home feeling great and energized, and this time I'm returning as a decent Pickleball player.

It’s incredible to think of where this journey has taken me and where it will take me next. I’ve ended up in this beautiful place because I met Mechanic and then Isaac on the Internet while trying to solve a business problem in Canada—and I’m so grateful their light drew me in.