Studio · About
About
the studio.
FlossyPurse Studios is a creative engineering studio in Parkland County, Alberta, founded by Cully Wakelin, with agents doing a lot of the hands-on work. Below: who’s behind it, the road that led here and what each stretch taught, and what the studio has made since.
Cully
Who you would be working with.
I’m Cully Wakelin. FlossyPurse Studios is my creative engineering studio in Parkland County, Alberta: software, foam-dart blasters, printed parts and furniture, all on one bench. Before it, I spent years inside durable execution and developer infrastructure — at Temporal, then at Resonate — building the documentation, developer experience, SDK surfaces, and compliance programs those platforms stand on. Fifteen years of shipping software is underneath all of it, and the road below is how I got here.
- AI engineering
- Retrieval, tool use, and the pipelines that put LLM features into production.
- Building with agents
- Setting up the scope, gates and verification that decide whether the output is worth keeping.
- Distributed systems design
- Retries, recovery, and long-running work that survives a crash.
- Production diagnosis
- Finding the failure in a system that’s already running.
- Full-stack development
- Frontend, backend, database, third-party integrations.
- Technical support
- Triage, escalation, and integration work with large accounts.
- Technical writing
- Explaining a system so someone else can operate it.
- Compliance
- SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, control statements through to audit.
- Design
- Brand marks, identity, and websites.
- Marketing
- Positioning and launch writing.
The road
A career, walked as a trail.
A job list says where I sat. This is the road: the Navy, writing, the mountains, a van, a hot sauce company, and a lot of distributed systems. Every stretch was a venture into something I didn’t know yet, and each one left something in the pack.
1 a stop on the trail tag something picked up there
Region 1
The Wandering Years
The Navy, words, then the whole country.
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2006
University of Maine
Went to Orono to study writing, and swam for the university team while I was there.
What it taughtHow to take what I'd seen and put it into words someone else could use.
Picked upwriting
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Yosemite
Went west. Spent time in Yosemite, biking and climbing.
What it taughtNerve for the next move, and patience for the ones that take a while.
Picked upnervepatience
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Nine months in a van
Lived in a van and travelled the United States for about nine months.
What it taughtHow far a little goes when you're willing to make do, and how much there is out there to find.
Picked upmaking do
Region 2
Learning to Build
Came back and learned to make the machines do things.
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Back to school: computer science
Went back to school, this time for computer science.
What it taughtThat the machines could be made to do things, and that I could learn to make them.
Picked upcode
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Tech support, and a hot sauce company
Worked technical support, and did full-stack engineering for a hot sauce company. That is where I learned a lot of it: front end, back end, database, and keeping it running.
What it taughtWhen the system is yours to keep running, you learn every layer of it.
Picked upfull stacksupport
Region 3
Systems Country
Explaining hard systems to the people who run them.
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Microsoft
Technical writer on a networking team, on contract. My first real look at the networking side of things.
What it taughtHow the pieces of a network actually talk to each other.
Picked upnetworking
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Uber
Technical writer, and my first exposure to the software behind distributed systems.
What it taughtWhat software looks like when it has to run across a lot of machines at once.
Picked updistributed systems
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Temporal
Technical writer. Helped grow the technical writing team, managed it for a while, and built out the documentation. Temporal is also where I met Dominik Tornow.
What it taughtHow to grow a team, and build documentation that people can actually work from.
Picked updocumentationmanaging a team
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Resonate
Left Temporal to work with Dominik and learn durable execution properly. He is an amazing teacher: I studied distributed systems and durable execution under him, and turned very technical ideas into plain messages. Ran product on my own for two years and grew into a product engineer.
What it taughtHow to take the hardest idea in the room and make it plain, and how to own a product end to end.
Picked updurable executionproduct
Region 4
The Studio
All of it, on one bench.
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now
FlossyPurse Studios
A creative engineering studio in Parkland County, Alberta. Software built with agents and checked by a person, foam-dart blasters, printed parts, furniture, and whatever else the bench is good for.
What it taughtThe studio is new. What it has shipped is below.
Picked upagents3D printingmaking things
You are here
What’s in the pack.
Everything the trail put in it, and all of it goes into what the studio makes.
gritwritingnervepatiencemaking docodefull stacksupportnetworkingdistributed systemsdocumentationmanaging a teamdurable executionproductagents3D printingmaking things
Work
What the studio has shipped.
Open-source tools on the public npm registry, and projects live on the internet. Client work and private repositories stay private until a client agrees otherwise.
Tools
Open source, on npm.
Small tools, each under its own name with its own documentation. They exist because we needed them. Several came out of the agent that runs unattended.
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mycadre
liveA git-worktree CLI. Creates, lists and removes worktrees without the footguns — it refuses to delete work git has not accounted for.
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gitsignet
liveA git identity guard. Stops commits authored as the wrong person — personal email on a work repo, and the reverse — before they leave the machine.
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sottovoce
liveKeeps the code in your documentation in sync with the code in your repo, and tells you which snippet drifted.
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packproof
liveInstalls your npm package the way a stranger would — from the published tarball, in a clean directory — and reports what is missing before your users find it.
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otherbox
liveRuns your test command once as-is, then once per environment that differs from yours by exactly one thing — a timezone, a locale, an empty home — and names the change that turned it red.
Projects
Live on the internet.
Products the studio runs, with real users and real uptime to answer for.
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pitchroots
liveCanadian soccer in one feed, so following it does not mean checking six different sites.
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Tamrack
liveAn Alberta economic intelligence dashboard, published at tamrack.ca. Public data pulled together into a picture of how the provincial economy is moving.
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Tri-Region
liveA curated daily news feed for Spruce Grove, Stony Plain and Parkland County — dozens of local sources read every day, published as one feed.