Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S5 Bonus: Colin Chartier, Webapp.io (Formerly Layer CI)

Aug 19, 2021

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Colin Chartier started making video games when he was young. He used to played Warcraft 3, which had a powerful map editor for its users. He recalls that one game map was called goblet exploration, where you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and you had to make civilization (think a precursor to Minecraft). He found that this was really good for learning how to make things that people wanted... which ultimately, led him into entrepreneurship and programming He also played minecraft, which involved his first exposure to a real programming language, as map editing was done in Java. He lives in Toronto, and is a 20 minute bike ride from the water front. Many days, he will head down to the beach and work from there. He enjoys getting outdoors when he doesn't have too many calls scheduled that day.

In his prior startup, he found that he and his team were very sensitive to breaking changes, as it was critical to deliver information in a timely manner. So much so, that his customers would churn if anything broke in the critical chain. He created something to fill this gap at his prior venture, which he was offering up to friends and colleagues via open source.

This is the creation story of Webapp.io, formerly Layer CI.