Charlie Gleason
Designer, developer, creative coder, and musician
I'm a principal systems engineer at Cloudflare, working on design engineering and developer experience at the intersection of code and AI.
Before that I was a staff designer at Replicate, a lead product designer at Salesforce, owned design and brand at Heroku, worked on design and front-end development for London-based crowdfunding publisher Unbound, co-founded the Melbourne-based social film site Goodfilms, and was the technical lead of the Clemenger BBDO ad agency.
I studied design and computer science, and I like the space between creativity and code. I also enjoy the blind terror of the creative process, solving difficult problems, and writing custom GLSL shaders.
I cannot skateboard. I tried, but it was a whole thing.
In my spare time I like to work on micro projects, from AI-powered and tweet-based music videos , to design-focused macOS apps . I also sometimes write about development, contribute to open source, and share resources.
My work has been featured by Google's Creative Sandbox, and has received numerous awards, including from Awwwards and the FWA .
I believe there are few things more comforting than good documentation.
Recent writing (code.charliegleason.com)
A complete guide to exposing Ollama running on a Windows PC with a 4090 GPU so you can use it remotely with opencode via a secure Cloudflare Tunnel.
A complete guide to building and deploying a Model Context Protocol server that gives Claude weather superpowers.
A quick guide to building dynamic Open Graph images on the edge with Cloudflare Workers.
How to use WebGL on easy mode.
Or how to make the most of your tokens.
On the value of making things and sharing them.
- 2024 AWWWARDS, Nomination for Typography Honors , Lysterfield Lake
- 2023 AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention , Lysterfield Lake
- 2023 Salesforce TMP AI Hackathon, Winner for Overall Best Hack
- 2023 Product Hunt, Runner Up in the 2022 Golden Kitty Awards , Pika
- 2021 Product Hunt, Featured , Pika
- 2019 The Ink Award , Heroku Hanafuda Cards
- 2017 Typewolf, Site of the Day , Charlie Gleason
- 2016 The FWA, Site of the Day , Kōya
- 2016 AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention , Kōya
- 2016 Kickstarter, Projects We Love , One For Sorrow, Two For Joy
- 2016 The FWA, Site of the Day , Rugby
- 2016 AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention , Rugby
- 2015 The FWA, Site of the Day , I Will Never Let You Go
- 2015 AWWWARDS, Honourable Mention , I Will Never Let You Go
- 2015 Chrome Experiments , Tweetflight
- 2014 Futurebook Innovation Awards, Best Publisher Website, Unbound
- 2013 Google Sandbox, Tweetflight
- 2013 The FWA, Site of the Day , Tweetflight
- 2013 AWWWARDS, Site of the Day , Tweetflight
- 2011 AWWWARDS, Site of the Day , The Story of Mick Roberts
- 2011 Caples, Silver, Pop What You're Not
- 2011 Award, Bronze, Pop What You're Not
- 2010 AIMIA, Nomination for Effectiveness, Pop What You're Not
- 2010 ADMA, Bronze for Art Direction / Craft, Pop What You're Not
- 2010 ADMA, Silver for Automotive, Pop What You're Not
- 2010 MADC, Bronze for Best Microsite, Pop What You're Not
- 2007 Design Institute of Australia, Encouragement Award
Awards & Achievements
- 2024 Partner Summit: The Future of AppExchange
- 2023 Dreamforce: Designing a 5 Star Partner Listing
- 2019 Creative Coding London
- 2017 JSConf Budapest (Master of Ceremonies)
- 2016 Decompress: Blending WebGL and video
- 2012 Web Directions South: You are a developer, the internet is your friend
- 2012 What Do You Know: So, you are great (and so is Less CSS)
- 2011 What Do You Know: How to make your life more awesome with CSS3 media queries
Talks, Demos & Workshops
Education
RMIT University, Melbourne
2011 - incomplete
First Class Honours
Swinburne School of Design, Melbourne
2004 - 2007
- 2022 Salesforce User Experience (UX) Designer Certification
Certifications
Volunteering
2020 - 2024
- 2023 Blenheim Palace Triathlon (Sprint)
- 2022 Blenheim Palace Triathlon (Sprint)
Triathlons
- 2025 Fremont Quarry Lakes, Alameda, Santa Rosa, San Francisco Presidio, Oakland
- 2022 Manchester Great Run
- 2021 London Landmarks
Half Marathons
- 2017 London
- 2015 London
Marathons
- None
Ultra Marathons
Case Studies
A partner-focused overhaul of publishing.
Centralising the publishing process across multiple tenants, reducing the time to publish by 2.5x, dramatically speeding up the security review process by 3.5x, and 65% faster approvals.
An interactive, AI-augmented 3D music video.
Powered by open-source tools, Lysterfield Lake is an AI-augmented music video about a place outside Melbourne, Australia. It's about the endless summers of your youth, and the tiny changes in you that you don't even notice adding up.
Selected Projects
Selected Articles
Selected Features
" Charlie is so gifted and productive. I would work with him again any day. It's been a great professional and personal pleasure to spend these last few years travelling in his company, and seeing the great beauty he's brought to the world through his work on Heroku. May we have the chance to do good things together again someday! "
Margaret FrancisFormer GMHeroku / Salesforce
" Charlie is one of the most gifted, multi-skilled designers I have ever worked with. He's an amazing collaborator and teammate. Everything he touched made our work 1,000% better. "
Ashlyn WattersProduct ArchitectSalesforce
" What impressed me the most was his attention to every detail, his professionalism, his leadership in this space, and also his empathy and kindness. Oh did I mention he is one fantastic designer? "
Natalie MalloySenior DirectorSalesforce
" Charlie's nicer friends will say great things about his creativity and empathy, which is true, but not interesting. Charlie has hustle. He works and he works and he works, and that is how he got so good at what he does. "
John BartonCTOAmber Electric
" Charlie has a formidable blend of talents: a grounded, empathetic design sense, an artist's eye for subversion, and the tenacity to do whatever—and learn whatever—is necessary to ship projects. "
Glen MaddernSystems EngineerCloudflare
" Charlie has a unique, articulate, polished understanding of design, art and how people interact and care for one another. "
Will DaybleCo-founderSquareweave
" Charlie is a supercharged teammate . When he is assigned to something, he carries it to the finish line. He has laser-focused attention to detail [and] no fear when it comes to dealing in ambiguous and new spaces. "
Vicky ZeamerLead Researcher, Research & InsightsSalesforce
" [His] talent, humor, knowledge shares, thoughtfulness, storytelling, creative contributions, the list goes on! I'm grateful to have crossed paths. "
Olivia YuLead DesignerSalesforce
" Charlie is a developer of exceptional talent. He is personable and fun, and these qualities made him universally loved by the team around him. "
Becky BoltonFormer DeveloperUnbound
" [Charlie is that] near-impossible combo of crazy talented and down-to-earth. "
John GeyerTechnical Writing LeadSalesforce
Typeset in Commuter Sans and the system font stack .
Built with NextJS . CSS with Tailwind . Hosted on Cloudflare .
Primary illustration inspired by The Design Squiggle .