Luke DeWitt (BCS’06) has been known to enjoy a good baseball game along with a craft beer. But what he enjoys even more is building platforms that allow people to be entertained. 

Luke is the director of web services for REDspace, a software development company in Halifax that builds custom, innovative and scalable platforms for media, entertainment and gaming clients such as Warner Bros., Apple, Turner, MTV, Sony Pictures, IBM, and Nickelodeon. 

“We build systems like apps and players that engage consumers on the front end and push the boundaries on the back end. That TV show you watch on your favorite streaming app may be backed by one of our solutions. It’s so much fun to build something that people see and engage with all the time. We do cool stuff here.”

Luke went to UNB and fell in love with computer science, knowing that he wanted to build things that would be used and appreciated. After graduating, he soon found himself with job offers in Halifax, and chose REDspace because of the interesting work they did with media clients. “One of the earlier things I worked on was building the awards sites for some of our broadcast partners. We worked with teams in New York and Los Angeles and did fun stuff like live voting, AR experiences, and allowing users to make GIFs from a livestream of the event. Seeing so many people in real-time, watching our monitoring applications spiking, and seeing our content shared on Social Networks from our app was amazing. It didn’t take long for me to notice  knew then and there just how great we could be and that this company was ready to make noise in the industry.” 

Luke progressed from “a Flash developer to a PHP developer to a Javascript developer, with a bunch of stops in between before eventually ending where I am now: a web developer.” He’s also now helping to manage the company’s web team of over 100 developers and delivering strategy as well as speaking at conferences and trade shows. 

“I just continued learning as technology and the web and mobile and streaming evolved. You have to put in a lot of effort to keep up in this space, but we thrive on pushing the envelope and taking risks. It’s both fun and terrifying but it keeps it fresh. There’s never a dull day.”

Luke says that one of the most important things he learned at UNB that has helped him in his career was something Dr. Andrew McAllister said. “He told us that the most important thing that we’ve learned over our time at UNB was 'how to learn'. That stuck with me and I’ve been grateful for it.”

"We need to learn how to work with AI so that humans can be freed up to be creative and produce original ideas.”

As for learning what comes next, Luke says that he’s been playing around with AI and feels it’s here to stay. “I think the key is to figure out how to use it to augment your day-to-day work. We’ve started using ChatGPT to run proof of concepts and research and development. I’m not concerned that it’s going to take my job – I think we need to learn how to work with it to save time on mundane tasks, so that we humans can be freed up for being creative and strategic and coming up with original ideas.” 

The Fredericton native is proud to be doing such high-profile work from the east coast of Canada and says that bringing the best in entertainment experiences to people is important. “I love building stuff that brings people joy. I love sitting with my kids and enjoying games and TV together. It’s impactful and important for a healthy society. I also love that we’ve gathered together a bunch of really smart people doing great things right here at home, so we can contribute to our communities. It’s really nice to be able to do that.”