About
I came into software a little sideways. I ran a small business first, then chased the parts of engineering I found most interesting and never really stopped. I like research, digging into hard problems, and the occasional rabbit hole.
The path
Laptologist
While I was at Michigan I turned a laptop-review side project into a real business. Laptologist drove a few million in sales over its run, and almost none of the work was code: it was writing, SEO, analytics, and paying contributors.
It was fun for a while, until I slowly grew tired of the affiliate-marketing world. But it taught me how a business actually works, and that still shapes how I think about software.
Livegistics
Livegistics is where I really learned to build and ship software with a team: a greenfield platform for construction managers, a React Native app for the drivers, and all the data plumbing between them.
It was the first time I owned code that people depended on every day, and I loved it.
Trajector
At Trajector I worked across internal platforms, document-processing pipelines, cross-team integrations, and later some AI-assisted QA tooling. The platform we built went from an MVP to something an operations team lived in every day.
I got promoted to senior there, and somewhere along the way built the first EventBridge pattern that a lot of other teams ended up adopting.
Gauntlet AI
After Trajector I packed up for a ten-week AI engineering fellowship at Gauntlet in Austin. It was intense in the best way. Most of my time went into evals and a kids' learning app that ran computer vision right on the device.
Cover
Then I moved to LA for Cover. They design and build houses on a factory line and truck them across Southern California, closer to manufacturing than construction, which I find genuinely fascinating. I work on the software behind that pipeline, and I'm still pretty new.
Away from work
Away from work I run (sometimes a lot, sometimes not; it comes and goes), play more chess than I should, follow Michigan sports way too closely, and read about markets and whatever else has my attention that month.
In late 2023 I took a few months off and backpacked Hong Kong, Taipei, and Japan with one bag and no real itinerary. It's still one of the best things I've done, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Dates and titles are on the experience page. Public code is on the projects page. Experience Projects Now
Contact
Email's the best way to reach me, whether it's about work or you just want to chat.
flanagansean19@gmail.com