Greetings! Since you’re here I assume you want to read about me (or, at the very least, are obligated to do so). I’m Preston St. Pierre, a software developer from Vancouver, BC.

I’ve been riding dirt bikes since I was four years old; I didn’t start programming computers until almost five years after that. Nevertheless, these two childhood activities remain the great passions in my life.

While attending the University of the Fraser Valley, where I received my Bachelor of Computer Information Systems degree, I spent some time writing about open source technologies (and even a bit of fiction) for a variety of news sites (NewsForge, Linux.com, OSNews, and MadPenguin to name a few). Nevertheless, I continued to program computers regularly and even made a clone of my favorite browser based game from high school (Planetarion).

After university I began doing contract web development full time. I spent a couple of years learning new web technologies (ie CSS3, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, etc) and then began to work on my own software on the side. I spent about 6 months full time making an MVC based highly performant (<50ms responses) rapid development framework in PHP upon which I added a CMS, a store, a gallery, and a blog.

While Saint-CMS was never the resounding success I’d hoped, it did teach me a valuable lesson: A successful company has to sell. After licking my wounds, I moved on and tried again.

Taking my hard earned lesson to heart, I didn’t try to start Carburetor alone. For the last three years I’ve been working with my partner Collin, who has all the business skills I was missing. While I write software he is busy selling it, and the combination has proven quite fruitful.

Today we employ sixteen people full time. That number increases to over twenty-five if you count contractors and part time employees. I manage a team of eight software developers. Things sure have changed from the days when I was coding intranet messaging systems for high school credits. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.