The Briefing
He spent a decade preparing, craft by craft, to do everything alone. With AI, one person is enough: a steward of the web, bringing the part of hospitality AI cannot replace - a person who has answers, in place of the automated service on the phone that nobody likes. Full-stack web developer and design engineer in Vancouver, BC. Operations at scale, too: hundreds of thousands of prices kept accurate by one pair of hands. A decade in every craft behind it: a one-of-a-kind hybrid who knows how to stir all six senses - before hybrid was cool. For ten years I have designed and built websites, internal systems, and one living 3D world, always as documented systems rather than one-off pages. I currently design, build, and operate Espil.Online end to end.
The proof is in the record below. At Discover Holidays I authored the style guide the company's pricing catalogues are formatted by, and enforced it with InDesign scripts across thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of prices. At Higgs Creative I was already converting Figma designs into production HTML with AI assistance in 2022. And the design system behind Espil.Online, its laws, tokens, and components, is documented on this site at /system/.
Everything on this page was scoped, designed, built, and run by one person. That is not the biography. That is the offer.
I do not see IT and design from the maker's chair alone. I have worked from the standpoint of a one-person company, where every decision landed on me; inside a company as it grew to ten people, where the work had to hold up in other people's hands; and on the operations team of an established company, where accuracy matters every day. Across all three seats, feedback gathered steadily from clients, teammates and users since 2015 is still in how I build.
I was born in South Korea, but I only lived there until I was seven — my elementary schooling was in China, before Canada. I have been on computers since the DOS era, learning from grade 3 and building my first HTML pages as a child. Photoshop and Illustrator since high school, Dreamweaver in my web toolkit — and my high-school design work was already in use, by the Coquitlam Hall of Fame and my school soccer team.
Growing up across Korea, China and Canada gave me the cultural fluency I still work with every day: I read rooms, clients and audiences in three languages and three cultures, and I have run four-language web channels single-handedly. It is one of my real professional strengths, not a footnote.
The wanting of beautiful things has been constant, and I try the new ones first - an early adopter with fashion and the newest design objects. I kept a fashion portfolio in high school, and the design creation has never really stopped since.
Music is the other constant. The saxophone was my first instrument, learned in elementary school; in middle school I sang in a neighbourhood choir and performed with a samulnori troupe - buk, janggu, mask dance - on many stages. I played in bands every year of high school and stayed in bands through university. Since 2016 I have been hunting for my own EDM sound: dozens of tracks produced in FL Studio and released on SoundCloud (quad-clipse), and I taught myself piano to compose. On stage I perform with Onggijonggi, Vancouver's Korean musical club - in leading roles in its yearly small-theatre musicals, Korean year-end specials and nursing-home performances.
And I cook. My first F&B work was bartending, at FANTACITY; in Korea I served and managed at Hwatongsam, my aunt's well-known restaurant. Tawara Sushi is where the interest took hold, and Sushi Umi scouted me from it - eight years on its hot foods followed. At home I cook whatever Japanese or Western dish I am craving, at any difficulty, with ease. My profession is IT and design, but the cooking would hold up as a profession of its own.
I believe humanity today should spend less of itself on trivial problems, and instead work through the world's great challenges one by one - with a spirit of adventure, a spirit of challenge, and plain curiosity. Space travel. Deep-sea travel. It is the horizon everything I build points toward.
01 — Cover Story
Espil.Online began in 2015, at Bieclipse Design House — my own design practice — and it has been growing ever since. Today it is a free knowledge-sharing community in a living world on real cities, run as a live, interactive 3D map at espil.online — a Three.js world of real cities where you can walk the streets, and shop, drive, fly and dive with friends. I studied tourism for exactly this: social channels try to share a country's culture, but I am convinced only going there truly shares it - walking its streets yourself. This world is built on that conviction. I design it, build it AI-assisted, and ship it end-to-end myself: engine, interface, pipeline, sound and channels.
It started with a single obsession: I wanted to build a house. The design I aimed at was a 3D-printed house - minimalist, standing in nature without disturbing it, powered by its own water and sun, off the grid entirely. And because a house you never leave could grow dull, I imagined a VR chamber inside it: a room that copies a place completely - its temperature, its humidity, its wind - until you feel you are standing there. Everything in that house would be 3D-printed, and the models for all of it bought inside an online world - this one - traded not in real money but in Leo Coin, a currency that grows as knowledge is shared.
The name I sign this world with is Espil Ceil. Spell Bieclipse backward and you get espil ceib — I removed the “o” from cei’b’, as o is Earth.
Everything I make is one connected world. Every project is a door; every door opens to the same world. The Cauldron is that space itself - the one you enter at espil.online.
These usually arrive as three hires and a translation budget. Here they are one seat.
02 — Selected Works
Reviewing my design work? Start with the two case studies: Espil.Online and Discover Holidays.
An online web-based 3D social world for real-time shopping and trading, played in real cities: a live interactive 3D world built with Three.js and shipped end to end by me - engine, UI, pipeline, sound, channels. It begins as a mall where everything in real stores can be bought, and its trade is designed to run person to person on trust: stalls in the world, promises instead of fees, a signup kept a little strict to protect both. I design it, build it AI-assisted, and run it under a documented design system of laws and tokens. → The case study: designing the system, not the screens · The design system behind it
Hired in sales at a Freedom Mobile franchise, I became the company's full-stack developer and its backend person. I migrated the entire Excel-based customer list - years of monthly sheets - into a real database, fully manageable through CRUD, on an intranet CMS with dashboards. A Python script read the old sheets by pattern recognition and generated clean CSVs; a JavaScript reader scanned the standard contract PDFs and filed price, name, and address straight into the database.
The company's first and only employee when I started, I was its all-in-one: logo design, web design and development, social media marketing, ads, SEO, blogs, video editing and YouTube management, client management, and a landing service for immigration clients. I grew its YouTube channel to its first 1,000 subscribers - the videos I produced are still its most-watched, with over 500,000 views between them - and by the time I left, the team had grown to about ten people.
Headhunted by the company's founders - dermatology doctors and business owners - I tested healthcare software: electronic medical records, CRM tooling, and OCR. My other work there was design-to-code: a designer produced the Figma designs, and I converted them into production HTML with a Figma-to-HTML tool, then wrote Python to merge the tool's similar class names into shared ones - an early, manual form of what design-to-code pipelines now automate. It took longer than building by hand, and it taught me what AI-assisted coding would become.
One gate, five directions. AIO is arranged by my five-direction design: split the sections so each reads as a page of its own, and a catalogue opens into branches of choices instead of a pile of buttons. The centre is the main page; the left is the past, and freedom; the right is the future, and the decision; the top is dreams, and the tools for them; the bottom is the current state. Inside, the Production wing runs the complete Kuro Sushi menu with a working cart, and holds the Sushi Umi kitchen recipe system in its format. → Enter AIO
At a travel wholesaler, I rebuilt how the pricing catalogues are made. I converted the company's legacy database into an API as a single source of truth, authored the style guide the catalogues are formatted by and enforced it with InDesign scripts across thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of prices, and cut production work estimated at months down to a single day. The work converted my internship into a full-time role, and my tariffs carried the company's Alaska and Canada programs. It is also where I learned when not to ship: I built the online replacement within weeks, and chose not to launch it. → The case study: rebuilding the tariff system
Coming soon - the game app of Espil.Online: the game extension of the same universe, set on Zealandia, New Zealand's hidden land, the sunken continent beneath the sea. → The game extension of Espil.Online.
Two local AI systems that work beside me. Plushy AI is my own image-to-3D pipeline, built to generate 3D assets on my own hardware instead of renting the problem away. Buildings are a first-class output: city sets of building sprites and 3D remakes come out of this pipeline. Its services run in Docker containers, so the whole pipeline is reproducible: the same environment on any machine, every run. Ollama is where Espil - the world character, and my assistant - gets its character. Both exist because the world I am building needed tooling that did not exist off the shelf.
A non-profit Korean musical company in Vancouver, run like an entertainment house and still going strong. Its members have been picked up for background casting again and again, and for two seasons I was its marketing manager: promotion, member recruitment, and special events, including a live sports screening at the rented Korean community hall. On stage I performed in leading roles in its yearly small-theatre musicals, and our original production was covered by YTN.
03 — The Record
Twice, employers moved first: headhunted by the founders of Higgs Creative, and converted from intern to full-time staff at Discover Holidays on the strength of a single project.
I was born in South Korea and lived there until I was seven; my elementary schooling was in China, before Canada. I have been on computers since the DOS era — learning from grade 3, building my first HTML pages as a child. Photoshop and Illustrator since high school, Dreamweaver in my web toolkit — and my high-school designs were already in real use, by the Coquitlam Hall of Fame and my school soccer team.
Designed, built, and operates a live 3D social platform solo, end to end: product, interface, code, and the serverless backend (Cloudflare Workers, D1, Durable Objects, R2) - accounts with deliberately strict signup, real-time presence and chat with nothing stored server-side, a 1:1 DM relay, and a peer-to-peer stall marketplace. Planned since 2015; the presentable product was implemented in under a month through an AI-agent workflow (Claude Code, authored agent skills, written standards, QA passes).
Leading the future, never following.
I alone produced the entire Alaska + Canada tariffs under the Founder's direction - hundreds of pages of price sourcing, data entry, image work and posters - and the tooling I built finished a job estimated at several months in one day. I also authored the style guide the catalogues are formatted by, and enforced it with JavaScripts inside InDesign. To escape the manual workflow I built my own Python tool on the company intranet API (bulk typo-finding and correction, price and property search). The tariff content itself is company-confidential; the scale and the process are the story. Operations taught me that accuracy is paramount - and exactly which steps buy speed. → The case study: rebuilding the tariff system
My own design practice for a decade: client websites, portfolios and systems — including a dermatology clinic's complete web system (design, landing, chatbot reservations, online booking) and a website for a PhD client, Monicahan. Through Bieclipse Design I also contributed to numerous other client design and website projects, including builds that were delivered but never launched. Espil.Online also began here, in 2015.
Fine arts, and decades of graphic design and product design.
I started at the same address a year earlier, as a server at Tawara Sushi, where my interest in cooking took hold. When Sushi Umi scouted me, I asked the Tawara owner's understanding and joined the Umi team - and spent eight steady years on its hot foods. In those eight years, every other sushi restaurant within about five blocks closed; Umi was the one left standing, and I helped it open a second location on Granville Street. The trust runs both ways: in July 2026, at the owner's earnest request, I returned for three months as emergency staff. I documented the kitchen's recipes into a standardized, bilingual (Korean/English) recipe system — 21 recipes, one format, any cook, same taste. Early on I proposed the transitions myself - an answering and ordering machine, website changes, even a QR digital menu - and showed drafts the owner asked me to build. Later, when a full redevelopment of the menu board was requested, I declined it. Eight years in that kitchen taught me the shop exists for its locals and for its taste, and some old things earn the right not to change.
Decades of cooking, and bartending.
Hired in sales, on the floor of the company's Freedom Mobile franchise, I ended up migrating its entire Excel-based customer list into a managed database. I grew through marketing and design work into the company's full-stack developer - and its backend person. The database was fully manageable through CRUD, on top of an intranet CMS, dashboards and OCR-based PDF data entry - including a JavaScript reader that scanned the standard contract PDFs and filed price, name, address and the rest into the database. A Python script turned the old monthly sheets into new CSVs by detecting their patterns.
I was headhunted and funded by dermatology doctors and business owners to test healthcare software - electronic medical records, CRM tooling and OCR - and to cover the company's IT needs. In 2022, before ChatGPT, I was already implementing design-to-HTML with AI: a designer's Figma designs for a client's website, which I had to turn into code: I brought the design in as-is with a Figma-to-HTML tool, and used Python to merge the similar class names the export produced into shared ones. It took longer than building by hand, and it taught me what AI-assisted coding would become.
Years in hospital-related fields, where hygiene is a law, not a preference.
I began as the company's sole employee - my first remote job, handed over by a predecessor who left within days - and by the time I left, the team had grown to about ten people. Hired as a marketer, I ended up running far more: I managed all of the company's websites — including four different language channels — plus its YouTube channel, which I grew to its first 1,000 subscribers, its SNS and blogs, video editing and official documents, plus logo design, ads and SEO. The SEO was the sharp edge: on early-child-care searches, Nohproblem filled the first pages of both Naver and Google, and the local businesses promoted alongside it - an auto mall, telecom and moving services, schools - grew into names Vancouver knows. People from those years still ask for me by name. I also handled total landing-service care for immigration clients: house search, cars, furniture, schools, driver's licences. The videos I produced for that channel are still its most-watched, with over 500,000 views between them, and the channel has since grown to 15,000 subscribers.
Decades of music production, instruments, musical theatre, and singing.
Front-line sales and customer service — and after the sales work, I designed and developed the store's intranet.
I was hired as a graphic designer and worked as a travel rep, producing the daily brochures customers travelled with — trip plans and personalised infographics, designed to be read at a glance.
Tourism Diploma — Capilano University. Culture, heritage, environment and tourism planning.
Digital Design Development — BCIT. Graphic design, web development, web-based marketing and project management.
Chinese Medicine studies — PCU College of Holistic Medicine. Herbalism, acupuncture, anatomy.
Fine Arts studies — Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Drawing, painting, photography, design.
Decades of fine arts: hands that touch and feel in three dimensions.
Sentinel Secondary School — West Vancouver. Before that, Balmoral Junior Secondary; in 2006–2008 I served in the 103 Thunderbird Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Cadets (rank: Corporal).
04 — Capabilities
Seven departments is not a headcount. Each one is a craft I have practised for years - what changed is how the production underneath them is staffed. For Espil.Online I opened a set of specialized AI departments and run them the way a studio runs its floors: world and map production, 3D assets, character skills and motion, music, quality assurance, architecture, and a coordination office that keeps every department's state identical. Each works a defined scope, from a written brief, inside the documented laws.
Direction stays with one person. I set the canon, the priorities, and the order of work, and every consequential decision is mine - when the game's maps had to come first, every department was mobilized behind that single pipeline. The discipline is what makes the division professional rather than merely fast: decisions, blockers, and completions are broadcast to all departments in identical form, and nothing is called done until it has been verified against the live build and passed my own screen. Security and architecture are part of the same discipline: an architecture review stands before every production deploy, vulnerability review is a standing routine rather than a reaction to an incident, and code review is continuous and self-imposed - the floor a small or mid-sized company buys with a whole engineering team, run here by one person. Many hands, one judgment - that is the staffing the seven departments run on. The full account is in the Espil.Online case study.
I design and build responsive websites and interfaces end-to-end — from first sketch to shipped page — in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with React and Three.js/WebGL where the work calls for them.
Twenty years of visual craft: brand, layout, 2D and 3D. My high-school designs were already in real use; my clinic, restaurant and retail clients still run on systems I designed.
Backend runs through my whole career. At HMC (Han Mobility) I migrated an entire Excel customer list into a database with full CRUD, and built the company's intranet on the MERN stack. QDerm, a newly opened dermatology clinic, brought me in to build its website and consult on the network for its in-clinic devices; the CRUD booking system they asked for I built solo - React over a JSON API with a local database - and the clinic never put it into use. Ryde took the same work to APIs, integrating TransLink wholesale; today I build on Firebase and Vercel API processing, Espil.Online's own serverless endpoints included. Given a company's existing CRUD system, I can draw an API out of it and build on that - I have repeatedly moved channels off PHP backends onto APIs and worked through the problems that migration raises. I can read and extend PHP when a codebase needs it, but my own builds have always run on React, JSON APIs, and local databases.
My headline workflow. I build with AI assistance — directing the tools, reviewing and editing the code myself, and choosing the right stack for each job. It is how Espil.Online ships, and how I built Plushy AI, my own local image-to-3D pipeline, run in Docker.
Operations work taught me where hours actually go. At Discover Holidays I wrote Python tooling on the intranet API and macros that cut a months-long job to one day — accuracy first, then speed, in that order.
As Espil Ceil, I compose and produce original BGM — including a per-city theme system for Espil.Online. Sound is part of the product, not an afterthought.
I grew up across Korea, China and Canada. Korean, Mandarin and English — all fluent. At Nohproblem I ran four-language web channels alone; cultural fluency is a working tool for me, not a line on a form.
05 — Correspondence
I am looking for full-time work in Canada: front-end, full-stack, or design engineering, remote or Vancouver hybrid. The fastest way to reach me is email; the fastest way to judge me is the live project.
For most of the last decade I was not on the market: the seat stayed filled, by employers who headhunted or converted me, and by clients who kept coming back. I am on the market now, and I intend to choose deliberately: the company whose foundations I spend the next years building. If that is the hire you are making, I would like to talk.
Full Index
Everything else I have made and kept — every subdomain of my old network was one of my records, so all of it is listed. Compact, dated, and honest about what each thing is.
…plus several reserved project codenames, kept for worlds not yet opened.