About the Lab

The Builder Behind the Lab

Idea Warehouse is Colin Smillie's personal technology lab. A place to build, experiment, and ship real products. From mobile games to news aggregators, each project is a chance to explore new tools and ideas.

I'm a technology executive. Most recently VP Technology at YMCA Canada, where I led technology strategy across the organization. This lab is where I build things I'm curious about, outside the constraints of day-job roadmaps.

Background

My background spans decades in digital technology and marketing. I served as Vice-President of Digital and Social Media at Hill+Knowlton Strategies, collaborating with major global brands and WPP teams worldwide. Before that, I co-founded Refresh Partners, a social network marketing agency serving brands like Adidas, Ford, and Volkswagen.

What I'm Building Now

These days I'm most interested in AI-assisted development, using tools like Cursor and Claude to build and ship products faster than ever. Every project here is a real experiment: some take off, some teach me something, and all of them get shipped.

The Stack

The projects on this site span e-commerce (Shopify), mobile games (iOS/Swift), web applications (Next.js), and more. They're built with a mix of hands-on coding, AI-assisted development, and years of product instinct from the enterprise world.

Professional Work

Outside of Idea Warehouse, I work with organizations on technology strategy, AI adoption, and building better digital products. You can learn more about my advisory and executive work at colinsmillie.com.

Other Projects

Cash Grab NG is a vault heist arcade game for iOS, rebuilt from a Cocos2d prototype using Cursor AI and Swift. Fresh News is a bilingual Canadian news aggregator pulling from 75+ outlets. Wolf Wednesday is a pop-up Shopify store for wolf-themed apparel. Model Trust is an AI model evaluation platform. All are live and publicly available.

Connect

Find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter, or visit colinsmillie.com for professional work. Idea Warehouse is also on GitHub and LinkedIn. I'm always happy to hear from people building interesting things.