About us
Retainium Limited is a Canadian company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Two software engineers decided they liked working together: Crystal Parker and Laura Abro. We became friends after working together at a blockchain startup, then took on a project of our own. We own RETAINIUM together.
Crystal had recently graduated from Dalhousie University with first-class honours as an adult student, after a few years of teaching herself to code. Laura had recently returned to Canada after years abroad and graduated from NSCC as one of the first students to complete the college’s new AI program. She was awarded the Governor General’s Academic Medal.
RETAINIUM started as a side project. It grew out of a cheat-sheet generator Crystal built for a cloud computing course at Dalhousie University — a formula library, with no AI.
We now work together as software engineers at a company focused on accessibility. RETAINIUM is what we build in our spare time, with help from a few friends, and we hope it grows into something lasting.
If you’d like to know more, you can find us on LinkedIn. We also attend local tech events in Halifax to keep our skills current and stay connected to the community.
Our contributors
We currently have two friends contributing to the project as developers.
Sarah Poulin is our most active contributor and a longtime friend of Crystal’s. She joined the project after Crystal and Laura had already begun building RETAINIUM, around the time she finished her BA at Dalhousie and was working on an NSCC full-stack development certificate. When we presented RETAINIUM at a local AI meetup, Sarah ran the demo.
Ardavan Shahrabi has been a friend of Crystal’s since their time at Dalhousie and joined RETAINIUM as a developer contributor around the same time as Sarah.