Dev Diary: Building a Canny clone in production with Claude
After our free plan in Canny was retired, we had to reassess the value of paying for yet another SaaS, or building it ourselves.
Hi I'm Gabe 👋
I’m an experienced product designer and design engineer with over a decade working across design, engineering, and product strategy. I’m currently a Senior Design Engineer at Buildkite, where I work within a small design engineering team embedded across product teams, currently focused on the Buildkite Agent and agent experiences.
My background spans UI/UX design, web development, branding and product management. I'm proud to bring a rare blend of technical fluency and design thinking to my work and leadership style. My work reflects a deep commitment to building intuitive, human-centred products and fostering collaboration between design, engineering, and business to create meaningful, scalable user experiences.

Designing a mobile-first galleries experience that became the platform's most-used feature within weeks of launch.

Leading a platform-wide architecture migration while keeping the product running for thousands of photographers.

Brand identity, logo, and web design for a Byron Bay tennis label blending classic court aesthetics with modern streetwear sensibility.

Brand identity and logo for a design thinking community that grew from Byron Bay into a national network of city chapters.
I’m a Senior Design Engineer at Buildkite, working as part of a small team of design engineers embedded across different product teams. I’m currently working with the Agents team, focusing on the Buildkite Agent and the interfaces around how customers configure, manage, and interact with agents across the product.
Alongside product work, I contribute to design engineering initiatives across the platform, with a focus on the design system, consistency, and overall product cohesiveness. My work involves regularly speaking with customers, synthesising insights from across the business, and combining those perspectives with strong design and engineering practices to shape solutions that are useful, intuitive, and scalable.
I led Product at Unscripted Photographers, managing a team across engineering, design, and product while overseeing the direction and delivery of our iOS, Android, and web platform.
I owned both product strategy and engineering priorities — from discovery and roadmapping through to release management — with a focus on team development, solving real user problems, and using data to guide what we build next.
Drove product-led growth strategy for a scaling startup serving professional photographers, managing a multi-disciplinary team of designers, engineers, and product marketers while leading product discovery, prototyping, user testing, and continuous improvement cycles.
At New Beach, I worked across design and frontend development, creating user interfaces and reusable web components, building responsive frontends in Ruby on Rails, Django, and React, and contributing to backend and database decisions alongside our remote engineering team.
At Navarra, I worked as a UI Designer on a part-time basis, focusing on website and app design for key clients at a full-scope branding agency specialising in visual communication.
At Gothenburg Film Studios, I progressed from graphic design intern to Graphic Designer and Web Developer, working on the visual development of GoKinema and delivering multiple websites and production graphics for both small and large-scale film projects.

After our free plan in Canny was retired, we had to reassess the value of paying for yet another SaaS, or building it ourselves.

Navigating some of the big changes we’re seeing as designers working in product.
