SetDots
SetDots
The person behind SetDots
A technologist who came up through film and music — and built SetDots to give crews the calm, real-time coordination he wished he'd had on set.
SetDots grew out of a simple frustration: the tools that keep a film set in sync hadn't caught up to how fast a set actually moves. I've spent my career at the intersection of technology and storytelling — building software systems on one side of the day and making music and films on the other — and SetDots is where those two worlds finally meet.
I believe the best tools get out of the way. They reduce the chatter, surface exactly what each person needs, and let the crew focus on the work. That's the philosophy behind everything in SetDots.
An engineering leader in cloud-native and open source. I helped steer the Kubernetes project — running the release process for a major version and shaping its architecture and enhancement-proposal process — and have held leadership roles at companies including Google, Microsoft, VMware, and Upbound. My focus has always been on building healthy, inclusive teams and communities that ship.
A composer, producer, and actor whose credits include Trüebadour, Homestead, and Bampire. Time on set is exactly what taught me where coordination breaks down — and what a production team really needs from the tools around them.
A saxophonist and composer who studied saxophone performance, musical theater, and composition at Western Oregon University. I founded Score Reveal Productions to create original scores, and I'm also a visual artist and hand engraver of brass instruments.
"Every department should see what's happening the second it changes — no walkie relay, no guessing."
Coordinating a shoot is a real-time systems problem dressed up in gaffer tape. It's the same challenge I've solved for distributed software teams — keep everyone working from one source of truth, make the important thing impossible to miss, and let the rest fade into the background. SetDots brings that discipline to the set: live status everyone can see, call sheets that build themselves, one calm channel for the whole crew, and a QR code that gets anyone up to speed in seconds.
Have an idea, a question, or a war story from set? I'd love to hear it — jaice@setdots.com.