Developer.ish by Brandon Him

Hey, I’m Brandon.

I build things. Sometimes for big companies, sometimes for myself, always with the goal of making something genuinely useful for people.

By day, I work at Apollo GraphQL, helping enterprise teams adopt technologies like the Supergraph, working at the intersection of federated architectures and the shift toward AI-native infrastructure. By night (and weekends, and early mornings), I use AI to prototype and ship projects that would have taken me months to build solo just a few years ago.

Where I Come From

I grew up as the only son of Cambodian immigrants. My parents spoke some English, but I spent a big chunk of my life watching what was difficult for them. Confusing paperwork, opaque systems, processes that assumed a fluency they didn’t have. I naturally fell into the role of translating that complexity, distilling it into something they could act on.

Looking back, that rewired how I think. It gave me a mental model I carry into everything I build: dive into the complexity, understand it fully, then strip it back to what actually matters for the person on the other end. I genuinely enjoy going deep on hard problems. But my instinct is always to surface the simplest path through them.

The Winding Path

I’ve been building online for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I ran popular gaming forums where I picked up design, community management, and my first taste of code. By my late teens, as my hobbies changed, I kept doing the same thing: building around whatever I was passionate about. That’s how I ended up managing and developing the experiences around popular Tumblr blogs with massive followings. Adventure Time Club grew to 250,000 followers at a pace of 20K a week. An Allegory of Aesthetics, a men’s fashion blog, built up to 20,000 followers. I was learning how to create audiences and craft experiences before I even knew that was a career.

In college, I got exposed to hackathon culture, and that’s what shifted everything. I participated in over 10 hackathons throughout school and another 10 across my professional career, some taking me across the world like competing in Bangkok at the APEC App Challenge. It changed my career aspirations entirely. I wanted to build, not just curate. I started as a designer, taught myself to develop, and worked across Urban Outfitters, Cisco, Okta, and now Apollo GraphQL, each time gravitating toward the messy intersection of product and engineering. I ran Pixels on Ridge, a Fitbit app studio where I built SDKs and reusable components for what was a pretty lacking developer tooling ecosystem at the time. It became one of the top clockfaces in 2020 before Google retired Fitbit OS. I also built open-source projects on npm that were downloaded millions of times and used in thousands of projects.

Through all of it, the thread has been the same: take something complicated, understand it deeply, then make it simple enough that someone else can use it without thinking twice.

What I’m Building Now

tinyjawns is my current passion project, built with my wife. It’s a family-centric newsletter for Philly families that helps parents find the best things to do with their kids each week.

Under the hood, it runs an autonomous event discovery system powered by AI that surfaces thousands of events every month. AI agents help curate and filter through all that noise, sorting the best across categories. But the final layer is us. Every Wednesday night after the kids are asleep, my wife and I spend a couple hours reflecting, debating, and sometimes arguing about what to include. We add our editorial insight, parent-focused advice, and the kind of deeply local taste that AI can’t replicate. We ship every Thursday at 5PM, and the numbers tell us people value it: close to 40% open rates and click-to-open rates in the mid teens.

It captures what I’m most passionate about right now: solving mundane, small problems using technology to make the important parts of your life incrementally (or significantly) better.

What I’m Excited About

AI equalizes opportunity. That’s what gets me.

I came from a financially disadvantaged background. I was lucky to have a shared computer growing up, but I didn’t have access to resources or formal education in any of this. I pieced together how to build and develop experiences from piecemeal blogs and YouTube videos, figuring out how technologies worked through trial and error. It was slow, and a lot of people in similar situations never made it through.

Now that’s changed. Anyone with a phone has contextual access to the world’s best insights. The gap between “I have an idea” and “I shipped it” is shrinking fast. Tools that used to require entire teams can now be prototyped by one person. The real differentiator now is passion, determination, and ingenuity.

I’m excited about what this means for people who think in products but couldn’t build them before. For communities that were always underserved by technology. And for the next generation of builders who won’t need to ask permission to create.

This blog is where I write about all of it: enterprise GraphQL, AI-assisted building, product thinking, and the occasional deep dive into whatever I’m tinkering with.

Feel free to reach out through email or find me on GitHub and Instagram.