About

I'm 34. I live in Petrópolis, in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, with my dog Boris. I started writing code professionally at 16 — and almost two decades later, the work still has the part of me it had then.

In 2016 I cofounded adōpets to fix a problem I'd seen up close: animal adoption was manual, fragmented, and that fragmentation cost lives. In 2019 we were selected for Techstars Boston, which sharpened the company and opened doors to the partnerships that would define what came next. Since then, adōpets has helped more than 400,000 families bring home a new pet.

In 2022, adōpets and ShelterBuddy — longtime partners in the ecosystem — merged to form Pet Loyalty. ShelterBuddy is a full shelter management system; adōpets is the adoption layer that plugs into it (and into other shelter systems too). Bringing them under one company let us go deeper on integration without closing adōpets off from the rest of the ecosystem.

Today, Pet Loyalty's three products process more than 720,000 adoptions per year across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand:

• adōpets — the adoption layer. Standalone or alongside any shelter software. 400k+ families served.
• ShelterBuddy — the full shelter management system. Led by my co-CTO Cameron.
• AME — a new product, built from scratch for our partnership with PetSmart. Adoption in retail, across 1,600+ stores.

I'm cofounder and co-CTO at Pet Loyalty. I lead engineering for adōpets and AME. Cameron leads ShelterBuddy. The team is 100% remote; the engineering I lead is mostly Brazilian.

The work is unglamorous in the best way. When our systems go down, an animal doesn't find a home that day. That's the bar. Everything we build gets measured against it.

Outside the work

I don't think any of us are just our jobs — and I'd rather not have a personal site that pretends otherwise.

I'm interested in gardening and growing food. Petrópolis has its own microclimate and I'm learning what it tolerates and what it doesn't. I write about that occasionally — more as someone curious than as someone with answers.

I'm also starting to explore music — specifically, producing music with AI tools. It's new, awkward, and a useful counterweight to what I do for a living, where I know what I'm doing most of the time. Here I don't. I write about that mostly to track my own progress.

Other things come and go in what I write — investing, sports, hikes around Serra dos Órgãos, life with Boris, books that surprised me. I treat this site as a place to think out loud, not as a portfolio.

Why I write here

I started writing code at 16. Eighteen years later, I'm still learning — about engineering at scale, about leading a remote team from Brazil that builds for users in four countries, about being a co-CTO responsible for outcomes I didn't have language for ten years ago. And about everything else.

If something I write resonates, or you want to compare notes — on software, on the garden, on music, on anything — reach out at hello@jhansonpk.com or via LinkedIn.