twohuts
?

One hut is mine. The other is open.

Lucas Hutyler

Software engineer since 2011. Happiest building things with other people.

Pick a hut.

This hut is mine. Liberty Lake, Washington, born and raised. Jeans, a t-shirt, running shoes. Writing software for a living and still enjoying it.
This one is open. My dad, my mom, my wife, my brother, my kids, a friend with a wild idea, maybe you. Whoever I get to build with next.

Who I am

I'm Lucas. I've lived my whole life in Liberty Lake, Washington, just outside Spokane. The town motto is "Near nature, near perfect," and after a lifetime of checking, I'm not going to argue. Lakes, mountains, and, for the indecisive, mountain lakes.

Dress code: jeans, a t-shirt, and running shoes. The running shoes are non-negotiable. I've worn them to places running shoes have no business being.

I've been writing software professionally since 2011. Before that I wanted to build cars. More on that in a minute.

When I'm not at a keyboard

  • Video games
  • Boating
  • Home improvement projects, some of them even finished
  • Science, especially alternative energy and how to store it, astronomy and space exploration, and wherever computing is headed next

How I got here

It started with a brake job. I had an old Pontiac Grand Am, the brakes were due, and my brother offered to help. We pulled the wheel off, then the caliper, and underneath was this whole intricate system that somebody had clearly thought very hard about.

I remember standing in the driveway wondering how I would build something like that.

For a while the answer was "become an automotive engineer and build a car." That dream isn't dead, just resting. In the meantime I went to school for Math and Education, took a Computer Science class as an elective, and found it scratched exactly the same itch. The rest is history. Or at least it's in version control.

What I'm building

By day I'm the Director of IT at Amphenol Network Solutions, though software has always been my favorite part of the job. On the side I'm working on Stepply, Zenosource, and Idle Party RPG, each with somebody in the other hut.

See the projects

About that second hut

"Two huts" started as "two Hutylers." I sketched the pair in a notebook back in 2017, long before there was a website to put them on, and picked the name before I'd figured out who the second one was. Honestly, I never did.

Leaving it open turned out to be the right call. A project is more fun with someone else in it, and finishing one is better when there's somebody to high-five. Over the years the second hut has been a lot of people.

The original sketch, 2017.

Who's in the other hut right now? Pick someone.

 

  • My parents

    Project people, through and through. They restored their cabin top to bottom, and I've gotten to help with a good chunk of it: framing walls, running electrical, building sheds. They return the favor whenever something at my house needs doing, which is often.

  • My brother

    He was taking things apart before he could read, and getting them back together came a little later. He's worked in HVAC and installed garage doors, and he has better mechanical and electrical instincts than most engineers I know. He's also the one who helped with that brake job. Some of my favorite evenings are just sitting with him talking about where technology is headed.

  • My wife

    The one who has heard "so I had an idea" more times than anyone alive, and the one I've built the most with: raising our kids and making a home together. Everything else in this section rests on the life we built in this hut first.

  • My daughter

    Endlessly creative, a dreamer who also happens to outwork everyone in the room. We've spent a lot of nights looking up at the stars. Her favorite is Vega, which I'm fairly sure comes from years of asking "what's that blue one up there?" She also has a few freckles on her right hand that line up almost exactly like the little triangle at the top of Lyra, the constellation Vega anchors. She's been carrying her favorite star around the whole time.

  • My older son

    Car-obsessed, with my brother's need to tear things down and understand them, which makes him handy to have in the garage. He also thinks big. In grade school he was buying two-liters of soda for 88 cents and reselling them at school, explaining to us that if he sold thousands, he'd have thousands of dollars. He's off to study Economics now, so the plan is proceeding.

  • My younger son

    Likes to make a buck and doesn't mind getting his hands dirty to do it. If I ask for help with something around the house, the answer is yes before I've finished the question.

  • My friends

    A few of us have spun up a couple of LLCs over the years with ambitions to stop working for the man. None of them have panned out yet. The friendships did. We still get together on Saturdays to build something new, lately with AI in the mix, whether it's a business tool or a game we hope goes viral. It's a blast even when nothing ships.

  • My weekend teammates

    Startup Weekend and Sparks Weekend. I joined my first team on a whim and got hooked on the whole thing: building fast, pivoting, figuring out whether anyone would actually pay for it, throwing a pitch together, and best of all, seeing what everyone else built. I've been a team member, a mentor, and an organizer since, and a few of those teammates turned into real friends.

  • Maybe you

    The hut has room. If you're working on something and want company, or you've got an idea that needs a second set of hands, the door's unlocked.

So the second hut stays open.