My name is Adrian Lebar, and I love making things that change people’s perceptions, that improve their lives. Making the world a ‘better place’ is a clichéd phrase now, but it’s what I’ve always aspired to. I’m not Steve Jobs and I don`t want to be. I don’t need to make a `dent in the universe`. But smoothing out even a short stretch of the road we all travel on? I want to do that. I am a musician. When I was a child, I was trained as a pianist at the Royal Conservatory of Music. I can play piano and guitar, even the violin, but I found my musical voice when I started playing bass at 13. I love making music, playing in a band, seeing people dance. Seeing them smile. Making it a bit better for them. I am an accidental programmer. I wanted to draw pictures on my first computer. My father, an electrical engineer, explained that the only way to do that was to learn to program, to speak the computers language. He told me that I could write programs that made pictures on the screen, if I was patient enough. I was patient enough to learn first BASIC, then C, and then C++. I drew a lot of pictures on that computer. I am an artist. While in high school, I was accepted into the Ontario College of Art. Circumstances conspired against that path for me, but I did eventually study graphic design, and came out into a world that was just discovering the Internet. Instead of an audience of a few dozen that being a gigging musician provided, the Internet offered an audience of potentially millions, an opportunity to make a serious difference. So I became a web developer, deliberately this time, and have been in the tech industry ever since. Like when I first picked up a bass guitar, I had found my voice. From 1995 till today, I’ve been building digital experiences and making the world a better place in my own small way. Smoothing down the road of life. The tools and technologies I have used to do that have evolved and changed over the years, from Perl and HTML to Swift and Javascript and Python and more. The roles I’ve played have evolved and changed too, from graphic design to coding to product discovery and cross-functional team management. For almost half my career I’ve been managing teams of technologists, designers and product managers, learning and growing, but always guided by the desire to make every interaction, every experience better than the one before it. I’m always looking for a way to increase the scope and impact of my contribution, to pave more of that road and make things better for more and more people. Becoming a manager and learning to build great engineering and delivery teams was a big step forward on that path, and I’m always looking for ever greater opportunities to grow and create. To smooth down as much of that road as I can. ©