Anojh Thayaparan

My path into tech didn't start in a server room. It started on the sales floor at Best Buy, then behind the Geek Squad counter, where most of the job was translating between what someone said was broken and what was actually broken. At Microsoft I moved up the stack to advising businesses on Dynamics CRM and watched software change how a company ran day to day. By the time I was the one writing the code, I already knew who it was for.

My degree at Simon Fraser is built the same way. A Bachelor of Arts with a double minor in Business and Interactive Arts & Technology, focused on interactive systems, plus cognitive science coursework on the computer science stream. Good software needs engineering, business sense, and design, and I didn't want to pick one. It took ten years, because I did it around a full-time career of consulting, MSP work, and running engineering teams.

Today I'm Chief Technology Officer at Airble Aviation, where I've taken the product from its first React Native release to a single GraphQL API serving the web app, the mobile apps, and the admin tools. I founded Glimpse Networks in 2017 so small Vancouver businesses could get the IT and security posture that usually comes only with a much larger budget. And since 2019 I've been the Systems Analyst at Courthouse Libraries BC, which keeps legal information reachable for anyone in the province who needs it. That last one is the work I say the least about and am proudest of.

In 2026, Wings Magazine put me on its Top 20 Under 40 list of people shaping Canadian aviation. Titles aside, I'm still the person who will spend four hours automating a ten-minute chore, self-hosts things that have perfectly good SaaS equivalents, and takes hardware apart to find out why it quit. Usually with my dog Bailey underfoot and a half-finished car in the garage.