About
Jeff Neet
Software engineer, designer, and traveler. Here is the short version of how I got here — and what I would tell you if you are deciding what to do next.
17 years
Building software
4M+
Users served
7 countries
In seven months
Co-founder
PxlPug
Seventeen years as a software engineer
I write software for a living, and I have done it across industries that could not be more different from each other.
Enterprise and defense
Lockheed Martin, the US Navy, and the US Army — systems where correctness matters more than speed, and a mistake is expensive.
Finance and data
NASDAQ and Equifax — high-volume systems handling money and identity for millions of people, where reliability and security are the product.
Product and manufacturing
Toyota and startup work — shipping to real users, learning fast, and rebuilding when the first answer turns out to be wrong.
Founder and lead
CTO, founder, and technical lead roles: deciding what to build, who builds it, and what to say no to.
The common thread is not a language or a framework — those change every few years. It is taking something complicated that nobody fully understands yet and turning it into something a person can actually use.
Original designer and developer for The Salvation Poem. In development.
Clayfire is a game still in development with The Salvation Poem. I was its original designer and developer — I did both the design and the engineering, which is an unusual combination, and it meant the ideas and the code shaped each other instead of being handed back and forth.
This is Clayton. Everything about him — the silhouette, the way the energy moves around him, the colors that read instantly against a dark background — is a design decision that then has to survive contact with real code, real performance limits, and real players.
Put the two side by side and you can see what a character design has to survive: the same silhouette, the same palette, read just as clearly whether he is standing still or thrown into a pose. If a design only works in the calm version, it is not finished.
Original designer and developer — I built the foundation the current team builds on.
Designed and prototyped 80 distinct gameplay mechanics.
Laid out half the levels in the game.
A game world has to do two jobs at once: tell you where you are in a single frame, and still reward you for looking closer. Every shape here is doing one of those two jobs — and someone had to decide which.
Co-founding PxlPug
A game company created for community.
Being an engineer is one job. Starting a company is a different one, and it is the part nobody teaches you in a programming class. At PxlPug we make party games — the kind you play in a living room with people you want to know better.
Why it exists
PxlPug is built on a simple idea: the world is a better place when we play together. Games are the excuse; the real product is people spending real time with each other.
What we make
Party games designed for a room full of people — Back Talk Party Classic and Back Talk Party Ultimate. Fast to learn, hard to sit out of.
What co-founding means
Not just writing the code. Deciding what the company is for, what we ship, what we turn down, and how we pay for it — while still building the thing.
Great games can spark great communities. That belief is why the company exists, and it is the standard every design decision gets measured against.
Seven months, seven countries
Last year my family and I traveled for seven months across three continents.
Long travel is not a vacation — it is a series of problems you have never solved before, in a language you may not speak, on a schedule that keeps changing. That turns out to be excellent practice for the rest of life. It also made clear how much of what I assumed was “just how things are” was only how things are where I grew up.
What I would tell you
Curiosity compounds
Every job on this page started as something I did not know how to do yet. The skill worth building is learning quickly, not knowing everything now.
Design and code are one job
How something works and how it feels are the same decision. The best engineers I know care about both.
Go where you are uncomfortable
Seven countries in seven months taught me more about adapting than any single year at a desk. New places reset your assumptions.