Brad Van Vugt
Member Of Product Staff at Databricks
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrad Van Vugt is a product-focused engineering leader with 13 years of experience building developer-first tools and communities, currently a Member of Product Staff at Databricks after leading Growth Product at Neon. He’s a repeat founder and operator—co‑founder/CTO of sendwithus and founder of Battlesnake, a popular multiplayer programming game that he later exited to DevCycle—who blends hands-on backend engineering with GTM and growth strategy. Based in Victoria, BC, he advises early-stage startups on developer marketing and growth while shipping product improvements informed by his full-stack engineering roots. His open-source contributions include back-end work on the Battlesnake Python starter, where he iterated framework choices and API design to simplify onboarding for developers. Known for building products that attract and retain technical communities, he pairs entrepreneurial curiosity with practical implementation across serverless, feature flags, and developer tooling.
13 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Winter 2014, Winter 2014 at Y CombinatorBachelor of Computer Science Digital Hardware Option, Bachelor of Computer Science Digital Hardware Option at University of Waterloo
Github Skills (8)
api10
python10
apidoc10
flask10
flask-ask10
web-development9
cherrypy7
testing4
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
BattlesnakeOfficial/starter-snake-python
Feb 2020 - Aug 2022
Get started with Battlesnake and Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 47 commits, 19 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Brad primarily contributed to the Python Battlesnake starter project, focusing on the back-end implementation. They refactored the server code, switching between the Bottle and CherryPy frameworks and ultimately settling on Flask. Their work included defining API endpoints for game interactions (start, move, end) and integrating basic game logic, including a move selection that transitioned from random to a hardcoded value before returning to random choices. The commits also included adding support for Replit.
pythonbattlesnakegamecompetitive-programmingweb-development
BattlesnakeOfficial/battlesnake-server-2015
Feb 2015 - Mar 2018
Contributions:16 commits, 1 push, 1 branch in 3 years 1 month
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