Cannaverse

In 2021, I began spending some of my free time experimenting with blockchain software. I found early clients through online communities and helped them build smart contracts on Ethereum, along with companion sites for wallet interactions and transactions. That work led to lasting relationships and even a role helping open the Seattle NFT Museum.

After those projects gained traction, I wanted to learn what it meant to build a creative engineering studio: not just deliver software, but find customers, understand their businesses, and take products from an idea through launch and operation. That became Youngworld.

A friend of a friend introduced me to a group of cannabis cultivators in Los Angeles who were actively exploring how technology could help their business. Together, we set out to understand and solve problems facing the cannabis industry.

On Cannaverse, I owned product discovery, client alignment, design, implementation, cloud architecture, contributor coordination, and launch readiness. I led a team of full-time senior software engineers and managed dozens of contractor relationships.

The product let customers authenticate and verify physical goods they had purchased. Behind that simple interaction were identity, asynchronous processing, data storage, reporting, and day-to-day operations. We deliberately integrated blockchain technology, but could not assume that customers understood wallets or tokens. The system created a custodial wallet for each user and managed token minting and digital-asset reconciliation behind the scenes.

On a project this small, disciplines overlapped. I built client and partner relationships, found and coordinated contractors, shaped the product and brand, made the technical decisions, and carried the work through launch. Brand and marketing were new territory for me—and one of the steepest learning curves. Through my network in Seattle, I found and contracted a team of 3D motion designers to help build Cannaverse's visual world and the content that introduced it. The cinematic was part of that effort: it gave the product a world people could feel, not just a set of mechanics to explain.

I went into the project eager to deepen my infrastructure skills. That enthusiasm pushed me to design for imagined scale before the product had earned it. The platform started mostly serverless on AWS Lambda and S3 because I believed it was the right foundation for a resilient web product.

In practice, the tradeoffs accumulated: duplicated code, difficult testing, slow startup, and increasingly costly static frontend builds. As usage patterns, product constraints, cost, and operational needs changed, I carried the live system through multiple migrations. There was no clean pause in which to replace everything; each move had to preserve the product while changing its foundations underneath.

The system moved from AWS Lambda and CloudFront, to a monolithic backend written in Go, and finally to a flexible ECS deployment that lets us scale without giving up fast delivery.

The platform now serves roughly 40,000 users and 80,000 authenticated physical products. It includes native messaging, custodial Ethereum wallets, and verified customer reviews.

Newer AI tools have made it easier to explore and ship changes, but the product still grows selectively: observed behavior, not novelty, determines what we build.

The lesson was not that the first architecture was right. It was that I could recognize where it was wrong, change it under live use, and let product evidence—not architectural theater—earn each next layer of complexity.