Thoughts on Software

Hi, my name is Gordon Cassie.

I am a corporate lawyer turned software developer. In 2013, I founded Closing Folders with a friend from law school. Our mission was to make software to run corporate legal transactions. Unable to secure funding to hire developers, I taught myself to program and was the sole developer on the product for the first three years. As we attained commercial success, we grew our team organically from revenues. I built out a sophisticated technical organization that could meet the stringent standards of the world's most elite law firms. Today, Closing Folders is used to power thousands of corporate legal transactions worth billions of dollars every year. In 2020 we sold Closing Folders to iManage.

In January 2024, I launched a new project, eno which I am now working on full time. eno is a modern word processor for the rapid creation and editing of documents. Its goal is to make professionals who work with documents 10x more productive than existing tools. eno is written in zig.

Over the last 10 years, I went from zero experience in software development to being kind of obsessed with it. My largest body of work has been building Closing Folders core product with python, Django, Pants build tool, celery, a ton of AWS services, terraform, Javascript, and Ember.js. Some smaller projects include building an S3 compatible proxy to Azure Blob storage with streaming encryption using nginx, openresty and lua, training a convolutional neural network to identify signature pages in documents, architecting a highly concurrent PDF page to image conversion pipeline using Lambda and DynamoDB and building a mini datawarehouse with Athena, S3 and QuickSight. I've also had the pleasure of navigating the world of law firm IT security and all the amazing audits that accompany it.

I live in Victoria, BC with my wife and three kids.

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