A builder, following the questions.
I’m Peter Newton, a technical founder and software engineer based in Hanover, New Hampshire. I’m currently building Momentra.
I’ve spent more than a decade building software across game development, Unreal Engine, immersive technologies, real-time systems, cloud infrastructure, APIs and data ingestion.
The medium has changed. The underlying interest hasn’t: how do you take a complicated environment, understand what matters, and build a system that makes it manageable?
That question has taken me through real-time 3D and engineering leadership at Glossi, software and automations for real businesses, and an AWS Certified Solutions Architect background. Today, it leads me toward public information infrastructure.
Operating a small local events guide, Salt & Green, made the hidden work of community calendars visible. That practical problem became an extraction experiment. Then it became Momentra.
I’m also a published technical author and have participated in the BRIC Actuator program. I keep returning to work where software meets people and the physical world.
AWS CERTIFIED Hanover, NHSaving 72 trillion work hours.
If all my work has one throughline, it’s saving people time. Every system I’ve built, from game tooling to event infrastructure, exists so somebody stops wasting hours on something a machine or a well-designed process should handle. “Saving 72 Trillion Work Hours” is the personal thesis that will outlast anything I make. The gravity of community event data infrastructure doesn’t change; it’s the current expression of it.
Systems of systems for engineers
I spent a decade making games: desktop, VR and AR, on teams from a handful of people to large studios. That is where I learned what I actually like doing. I enjoyed the work most when I could build something that saved the other engineers time and let a project stay directionally nimble. So I built systems of systems: a foundation every engineer on the team could build their own systems on, so nobody wasted hours on data continuity or interprocess communication. A product person would say I accelerated product velocity. The plainer version is that the hours went into the game instead of the plumbing.
The book, and an Epic Megagrant
Published Unreal Engine 4 AI Programming Essentials, simplifying complex topics around building games so anyone could understand them. Epic Games awarded an Epic Megagrant for the community education work around it.
3D automation in the cloud
Built a product that empowered art directors to work as 3D artists, closing the feedback loop that plagues modern design teams using photo-replacement technology. All of it ran on AWS: Unreal Engine applications streamed to the browser over WebRTC on EC2 images built through DevOps workflows, an event-driven 3D ingestion API that accepted many file types, and job queues designed so a failed step could be retried without losing data.
Leveraging Automation to Accelerate 3D Adoption
Spoke at RapidPipeline’s 3D Pipeline Days outside SIGGRAPH 2024, in a talk called “Leveraging 3D Pipelines to Accelerate 3D Adoption from the Ground Up.” The argument: adoption comes from easy-to-use tools, less time spent learning, more time creating, and wider access to modern technology.
A newsletter becomes a guide, becomes an experiment
Built a public community newsletter that led to Salt & Green and then Website → Events. Running them is where I learned the time savings is real, for the people publishing the information and the people looking for it. The guide ran on automations I built myself, so the calendar filled without anyone retyping it.
Scaling it for the world
Momentra puts everything I’ve learned and built behind scaling that up for the world, starting with the US: an event aggregator, event database and events API for trustworthy public events, where every record stays traceable to the source it came from.
Compare notes?
If you’re working on public event data, community calendars, local discovery, or another messy real-world data problem, I’m usually happy to compare notes.