John Baker

Pixel portrait of John Baker

Hello, I’m John Baker

Software Developer

Nice to meet you!

Growing up I was the kid who asked questions. A lot of questions. Today I'm not much different. My never ending curiosity to understand how everything works and my passion for games got me started programming in my early teens.

I excel at understanding situations and collaborating to develop solutions big and small. My development experiences include; backend, frontend, application, games, AR/VR, and more.

Check out my work

Over my 15 year career I've launched countless sites, apps, and games with many incredible teams. Below are a handful of my favorite and more recent projects.

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Google Design

Google Design

Lead Developer

Google Design is the home for inspiration and insights that move Google's product design forward. Get to know the breadth and craft of design and technology at Google.

I joined forces with Instrument and Google to reinvision and rebuild the platform. Working closely with Google engineers to ensure the application meets their high standards for accessibility and performance while managing a team of developers.

A highly customized CMS and API empowers a sophisticated design system developed in-house that utilizes Google's design principles. Hundreds of uniquely designed pages were translated into the new design system through a complex migration pipeline.

2022 - 2023

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Storyplace

Storyplace

Lead Developer

Storyplace is a social platform where you can write, read or listen to stories from people all around the world.

In my role I architected and developed Storyplace's backend services and helped shape the platform to where it is today. Storyplace web, iOS, and Android are all powered by a unified API that is performant, GIS enabled, and highly scalable.

We also developed a dashboard with many custom tools to monitor, manage, and moderate the platform.

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HDReye

HDReye

Lead Developer & Co‑Founder

HDReye is the first and only iOS app for creating custom 360° HDRi images for realistic 3D lighting and compositing. HDReye is an essential app for combining 3D animation realistically with footage or capturing lightmaps of any location.

My role at HDReye oversees the design and development of infrastructure that powers our application. These include our stitching pipeline, asset management, payments, user management, authentication and more.

2021 - 2023

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MusiCounts

MusiCounts

Lead Developer

MusiCounts is a Canadaian music education charity that believes music can transform the lives of young people.

I lead the development behind the rebuild of MusiCounts' online platform. This included a powerful CMS, content strategy, data migration, and design system. MusiCounts is built on top of Wagtail and is highly extensible.

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Capital One | March Madness 2020

Capital One | March Madness 2020

Lead Developer

Challenge former NBA-great Charles Barkley to a classic 16-bit style game of H.O.R.S.E.

Clocking in under 3MB this instant game can be embedded just about anywhere on the web. Built using HTML5 it is incredibly performant, even on the most constrained mobile devices.

Give it a try! It's not easy, but I promise you can beat Chuck. Best played on a mobile device.

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Transpose

Transpose

Lead Developer

Transpose is a dreamlike and gravity-defying time manipulation puzzle game in VR. It challenges players to solve increasingly complex physics puzzles as they explore an extraordinarily surreal world.

Our team had a lot of interesting technical and design challenges to solve with Transpose. Omni directional locomotion, body tracking through inverse kinematics, time manipulation, physics warping, and player comfort to name a few.

My contributions included; project architecture, pipeline & process, editor tools, state management, cross platform support, PlayStation VR port, UI, audio programming and more.

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Blasters of the Universe

Blasters of the Universe

Lead Developer

Blasters of the Universe is a first of its kind VR bullet hell game with intense gameplay that is heavily reliant on physical movement.

I helped lead the development effort and contributed to many areas of the game; editor tools, enemy behavior, gameplay programming, cross platform integration, PlayStation VR port, real time audio mixing, animation programming, UI, pipeline engineering, and more.

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Loblaws

Loblaws.com

Senior Developer

Loblaws is Canada's largest food distributor and retailer. I joined the Publicis Sapient (then SapientNitro) team to help build Loblaw's breakout online grocery ordering platform.

My roles on this project included developing interfaces and working closely with our backend teams to facilitate a smooth integration.

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Disney Spoonful

Disney Spoonful

Senior Developer

I joined the Disney Interactive team to rethink their Family Fun platform. An online resource for parents filled with; arts, crafts, recipes, and party ideas.

Spoonful was the first platform at Disney to be built on a new CMS. Our team helped define and build the CMS and workflows that would go on to power many Disney online properties for years to come.

I've partnered with some great people

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