I'm a passionate full-stack web developer and former Developer Advocate at Googlewhere I focused on serverless Google Cloud products like Cloud Functions, App Engine and Firebase. I love to travel and have been to 80+ countries 🌍. I've also been an avid runner, completing 19 half marathons and 5 full marathons.
Huge thanks to everyone who tuned in and helped us stress-test the platform during our first 24-hour run — Vinyl TV's free, always-on linear channel officially survived its beta baptism. You watched, you broke things (gently), and you proved a 24/7 channel about New York City is something people actually want. More Beta Days ahead — the count only goes up.
Film festival time! We're handing out the first-ever VINYL TV Development Awards — THREE of them — to some incredibly deserving filmmakers. See you at Tootsie's Video Vault!
Garage startup acquired already? News at 11!
New name, now with free hipster cred for your record player.
TBD — more to come soon.
TBD — more to come soon.
Bret is a New York City coder and software engineer who builds with React, Next.js, C# and more. He's the founding engineer at VINYL TV, a NYC-focused streaming service, where he built the entire version 1 of the web app — component architecture, streaming UI, and the linear-channel viewing experience. He cares about interfaces that feel as deliberate as the product behind them, and he's just as comfortable shipping a polished React app as he is designing the system it runs on. Off the clock, he builds his own small tools, like FileSweep, a macOS app with a swipe-to-sort mechanic that keeps finding its way into everything he makes.
Bret is a software engineer and founder building VINYL TV, a New York City–focused streaming service where every day he moves between computer programming and television programming. Along with the McGowen.io ragtag dev crew he ships production software, and on the side he designs and builds his own products, including Sifter, a personal productivity iOS app. He pairs deep technical execution with genuine product range — web, mobile, and media — and a habit of seeing ideas all the way from naming exercise to shipped feature.
I've been building This City TV — a curated streaming platform for New York City's best indie theater, film, and live performances. From standing up the business foundations to architecting a React Native app tuned for streaming, the goal is a digital stage that truly feels like NYC.
Combine the power of Kubernetes with the ease of use of serverless to create new, powerful and flexible development experiences. Watch on YouTube.
Come learn how to build a custom Action and see how the same tools can help you build a serverless chatbot for Slack and more using Google Cloud Platform. Watch on YouTube.
In 2015 I went to Tanzania to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. At 19,341 ft (5,895m) tall it's the highest freestanding mountain in the world! Read more about my visits to Africa.
Cloudability was a service that let you monitor and analyze your cloud spend across clouds and vendors. This is a vintage video from 2013 which means it's hopelessly out of date.
Functions, apps, and containers oh my! Serverless on Google Cloud covers a lot: compute, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, App Engine, containers, Kubernetes, and Firebase.
From London to Tokyo to Sydney and much more, I used to love going on runs when traveling. Check those out on my running page.
Vintage video (2013): Racker developer Bret McGowen guides you on how to set up Stripe in your Ruby on Rails web application so that you can easily accept online payments.
I'm into nachos, running, volleyball, and raccoons. Here's me meeting an awesome raccoon:
Prior to Google, I worked in the cloud industry at Rackspace as a software engineer. Before that, I led engineering teams at an e-commerce company, a government laboratory, non-profits and tried my hand at creating two startups. I earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Texas A&M University.
