Dean Speer

Product manager. Builder.

Dean Speer

A short introduction.

I work in product, from brief to launch to whether anyone sticks around. My background is in UX and design, and these days much of what I build involves AI and LLMs, from internal automation to the illustrated map on this site. I use process where it helps the team move faster and keep it light where it would only slow things down.

Outside of work I enjoy building and flying drones, and I'm slowly getting into robotics through smaller desk builds, from arms to rovers. Before product, I guided husky sled trips in the Arctic, led American study abroad groups across Europe and cycled solo across the United States to name a few things.

I have worked in a wide range of jobs, from hostels to landscape gardening to training hunter terriers and breaking in horses for a forestry association in East Germany. Every one of those jobs was fun, interesting and a learning experience in its own way, and together they taught me to see product, problems and people from more than one angle.

Currently tinkering with and ROS 2.

Where I have worked.

Experience

Additional experience

Education

Things I am building.

ShotFile

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Annotate on the image, bake in a short note, and file it in the right project folder under a clear name. Hand that file to a colleague or an LLM instead of explaining the screen again. With an LLM there is no long prompt. Attach the image, use the skill you need, and continue.

Used and approved by multiple friends, colleagues, and IT specialists across a wide range of industries and roles.

LangLens

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LangLens exists so screen copy can be read and translated in place, on a design, a deck, an email, or anything else, without leaving the page or retyping the text.

Click, drag and drop. Whatever text you highlight gets translated into whatever language you want in a pop over screen. Simple, yet effective.

Ghost Foundry

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Everyone has seen those posters. Old design, bold handmade fonts. You may even have one in your home. Those fonts now exist in digital form. Once handmade for a single use. Now available for you to use across your digital work.

Latch

Coming soon

Automated quality assurance for product releases. Takes the checklist of what should work, runs those checks for you instead of doing them by hand, and records a clear pass or fail for each item before launch.

This is something I have played around with locally, on projects. This will have a hub for tasks, pipelines, and gates for keeping humans in the loop on allowing things to access certain environments.

Physical systems.

I have been enjoying building and flying drones, and digging into robotics more broadly. That covers control, simulation, and how the hardware and software fit together.

Drone builds

Ongoing

Whoops through 3-inch and 5-inch builds, and currently building a Holybro X500 (PX4).

Software

In progress

Click for info.

Learning the software robots run on. Ubuntu, ROS 2 Jazzy and Gazebo running on my own machine, and Betaflight, PX4 and ArduPilot across my drone builds. Working through ROS 2 nodes, topics, services and actions, then writing my own nodes in Python. Next are PX4 in simulation, URDF and TF, Nav2, MoveIt and Isaac Sim. Progress is logged in a public GitHub repo.

Bench builds

In progress

Hands-on projects across the stack. Small ground robots, robotic arms, simulation, LiDAR mapping (SLAM), and autonomous drone flight. Built to turn the learning into things I can run and show.

Safety & ops writing

Coming soon

Reading, learning, writing how software and hardware products get approved to run in the real world. Regulation around everything on this page is getting tighter. It makes sense to understand the how and the why of these rules and how they come to be.