Hi, I'm David Sawyer. I'm currently building Link at Stripe. Previously, I was an engineer at Amazon as well as Seller Labs, which helped Amazon merchants to grow their businesses. I was an early employee at Experience, which was acquired by Cox Enterprises in 2014. I've also worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to build mobile apps that aid healthcare providers in identifying deadly diseases. I graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in computer science, and I live in Denver with my wife and four kids.
I like building cool stuff. Shoot me an email if you'd like to work with me.
After the great NFT market crash of early 2022, I partnered up with a couple friends to build a tax-loss harvesting app where you can sell us your worthless/illiquid NFTs for one cent each. We launched in November 2022 and have been able to help create over $12 million in tax write-offs for our users. I was brand new to building on the Ethereum blockchain, so it was a blast to learn all those technologies.
A Chrome extension that helps you find Airbnbs with fast WiFi. It leverages Google's open data set of speed tests at a neighborhood level as well as verified speeds for select Airbnb listings.
A Chrome and Firefox extension that gives you the real price per night of an Airbnb stay after accounting for any and all fees. The extension's popularity really took off after I posted it on Reddit. It was the #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, Lifehacker's Extension of the Week, and was written up by Forbes and BuzzFeed News.
A Chrome extension that enables users to upload an image to Imgur and get the resulting URL without ever leaving their Reddit tab.
It's always been a pet peeve of mine when people misspell "Chick-fil-A", so I built a Reddit bot that corrects some common misspellings of the restaurant. I used PRAW, the canonical library for interacting with Reddit's API, and I decided to leverage Docker to make deploying to my DigitalOcean server dead simple. It's been absolutely fascinating to see how users react to being gently corrected. Some hate it, but most seem to appreciate it and find it a hilariously specific use case for a bot. Check out its bot ranking here.
Some friends and I created our own fantasy English Premier League, and I built this tool to help us calculate the points earned from each game. It uses Football-API to look up match data and game commentary. I used the Fetch API and other ES6 features to build this, and using those made the development process a lot more fun. The 2016-2017 season is over (I think I came in last place), so the tool has now been decommissioned.
MailChimp did a cool marketing campaign with the podcast Reply All, and some friends and I wanted to collect all of the Freddie action figures which were released on an irregular schedule. It was always a mad dash to claim these free collectibles, so I automated the checking of the marketing page and whenever the Ruby script detected a significant change on the page, it would use Twilio to text a handful of people who wanted to always get the latest Freddie. How successful was this tool? See for yourself 😉
My wedding website. Also the first website I built from scratch. I was proud enough of the RSVP form that I posted it on Dribbble.
My take on the classic game, written completely in JavaScript.
Back before Google Maps did travel estimates by day and time, I was really wanting to know what my commute was going to look like once I graduated and started working, so I wrote a Node script that grabbed the travel time for my future commute from Google Maps at five minutes intervals and wrote the results to a CSV file. I let it run for a few months and got some really interesting results, so I created some charts that show what my commute times were going to look like depending on the time of day and day of the week.
