Conner Lane
Ex-Google engineer specializing in delightful immersive web experiences. Shipped playable web games to 4 billion+ users across 12 interactive "Doodles", built educational simulations at Brilliant, and now runs a full-service web studio delivering modern, performant sites and apps.
Work Experience
Software Engineer · Google
Designed, developed, and launched delightful interactive experiences (Google Doodles) to be showcased on the main page of google.com.
- Contributed to ~20 Google Doodles and served as primary engineer and/or creative lead on 12 — built rich animations and interactive experiences in HTML Canvas with GSAP and in-house JS game engines
- Proposed "treatments" for predetermined topics, driving significant creative influence — from motion design and character animation to game mechanics and UI choreography
- Ensured accessibility across all Doodles — keyboard-navigable gameplay & ARIA labels for Google's global audience.
- Led an initiative to decrease the engineering cost of building Doodles by ~75% (8 months → 2 months) by adopting Phaser over immature in-house tools; led workshops to train the team
- Assisted an initiative to migrate all past interactive Doodles from JavaScript to TypeScript
Creative Technologist · Brilliant
Designed, developed, and launched interactive educational diagrams to serve as the core learning material in the Brilliant app.
- Built ~200 interactive educational diagrams using in-house Elm libraries across Math, Computer Science, Physics, AI, Creative Coding, and more
- Collaborated with Producers (Course Writers & Pedagogy Experts) to ensure pedagogical accuracy in simulations and diagrams
- Co-designed and implemented new Elm libraries with a small team (~3 engineers) to accelerate diagram creation for previously uncovered topics
Owner & Operator · Sandpiper Studio
Co-founded and operate a creative web development studio, handling full-stack builds, CMS architecture, and accessible frontend applications.
- Architected and launched a full website redesign for an industrial fabrication machinery company — SvelteKit 5, Tailwind, Directus CMS with typed SDK integration and an AI-powered customer assistant
- Built immersive 3D web experiences using Three.js/Threlte with scroll-driven camera animations, dynamic lighting, and particle effects
- Developed a HIPAA-compliant automated appointment reminder system (Node.js, Microsoft Graph API, Twilio, SQLite) for a nonprofit child advocacy center, reducing manual reminder effort by ~90%
- Built on a modern open-source stack (SvelteKit, Tailwind, Coolify, PocketBase, Bun, Docker) with self-hosted infrastructure on Hetzner VPS via Coolify and Traefik