CB

Nova Scotia, Canada

Chesley Brown

Senior software engineer at Fountain. Founder of Gemel and RentChek. Coding enthusiast, husband and father.

Shipping software since June 2007.

That is 19 years of shipping software.

Things I ship

Scuttle

2026 · iPhone game · new

Pick a boat. Drop it in the sea. See what it takes to sink it.

A pixel-art physics sandbox with over 40 hulls that flood, burn, split and capsize. Swift and SwiftUI, with water and sprites drawn on the GPU in Metal and rigid body physics from Box2D. No network, no accounts, no analytics.

Scuttle gameplay: a burning ocean liner split in two and sinking at dusk

Gemel

2026 · iPhone and Apple Watch · founder

Calories and protein. Zero AI. On purpose.

No food database, no barcodes, no feed. Type a number and Gemel paces it across your day, so you know you're off track while there's still time to fix it. Pair with a friend for a streak that only grows when you both hit your goals.

SwiftUI with widgets, a watchOS app and complications, Siri, Apple Health and StoreKit. GRDB for storage and CloudKit sharing for pairing, so no accounts.

RentChek

2014 → 2026 · web and iPhone · founder

Property management for landlords, running since 2014.

Rent, receipts and expenses across every property. I built it to manage my own rentals and I've run it ever since. The original is AngularJS, NodeJS and MongoDB. In 2026 I rebuilt the front end as one React Native and Expo codebase in TypeScript that ships to iPhone and the web.

Earlier hits

300M+ assets migrated from MySQL to DynamoDB with zero downtime

100+ services I managed build and deploy for

3 apps of my own on the App Store

16 years old when I released my first game, Time Trigger

The path so far

  1. Fountain

    2024 → now

    Senior Software Engineer

    Mostly Ruby on Rails, and more recently JavaScript and TypeScript, building and operating well tested distributed services.

  2. Proof

    2023 → 2024

    Senior Software Engineer

    Mostly Go.

  3. InVision

    2015 → 2023

    Senior Software Engineer → Lead → Interim Engineering Manager → Lead

    Eight years, fully remote, in Go, NodeJS and TypeScript. Build and deploy for 100+ services on Kubernetes and AWS, a local environment every developer could run, and a zero downtime migration of 300M+ assets.

  4. Bluedrop

    2008 → 2015

    Programmer Analyst → Lead Programmer

    Built CoursePark from line one, then led a distributed team of 10+ developers.

  5. Statusfirm

    2007 → 2008

    Web Application Developer

    Media sites for thousands of simultaneous viewers and a live comment system.

  6. College of the North Atlantic

    2005 → 2007

    Diploma, Website Administrator

Player one

Chesley with his wife and two children outdoors in the fall
my crew

It started with a Pentium II and RPG Maker. At 16 I released my first game, Time Trigger.

Hosting Counter-Strike servers led to building our clan's website, and that led to noticing websites were becoming applications. I've been building them professionally since 2007.

I care about boring, well tested code, careful rollouts with a way back, and a setup any new developer can run in minutes. Post-mortems taught me more than launches did.

Lately that includes native iOS, which is how Gemel, Scuttle and the RentChek app came to be. Outside my home office, my wife and our two kids keep me grounded.

Let's talk

Questions, ideas or just want to say hi? Email me at me@chesleybrown.ca, or find me on X, LinkedIn, GitHub and my résumé.