I'm a self-taught engineer who has been building the internet since shortly after I knew what it was. I've always been interested in programming since childhood, and started my career working in php & html for the local school district when I was 14.
I work as much as I can on the bleeding edge of tech, and I work well with others who like to take risks and ship code. I'm a master of javascript, proficient in Objective-C and Swift, and have worked with nearly every web and mobile tech. I learn the fastest when I'm challenged.
I'm also passionate about optimizing not just the codebase, but also designing and influencing the productivity of teams. I'm an advocate of small, cross functional teams. I have a track record of being a successful leader and motivating team members.
I like to contribute to teams more than an average engineer. I thrive when I can influence product decisions and help design user experiences. I strive to be aware of all things about the companies I work for, not just the codebase. I try to solve problems creatively and cleverly, do more with less, and put my enthusiasm in my work.
I work in anything put in front of me. That said, here are some technologies I'm especially excited about:
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Javascript - I'm a wizard with node.js, client side js, and the art of combining the two.
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CSS & HTML - I've been working with html & css through it's long evolution. I work with best practices, and know all the tricks to creating beautiful web apps.
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Objective-C & Swift - iOS & Cocoa Development are a skill I've added in the last few years, but my experience is deep. At We Heart It I completed a ground-up rewrite of an app, now downloaded millions of times, and holding a 5 star average with tens of thousands of reviews.
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Scraping, parsing, APIs - If it's an API, I'm probably familiar. I understand HTTP on a deep level and come up with clever ways to get to the data you need. I know social & SSO APIs in and out, and always keep on top of what's possible with a partner API.
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User Experience - I have great UX instinct and can implement anything. I strive to balance creativity and familiarity in interfaces that delight users.
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Product - I self prioritize, can boil a product down to the bare necessity, and make sure the right people are working on the right pieces. My ability to work across the stack gives me a unique ability to identify challenges and make sure everything goes off without a hitch.
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Back end & Databases - I'm familiar in most back end architectures and have worked in most SQL and NoSQL dbs and key value stores.
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Generalism - I work in much more than just the above. I'm always learning & deeply committed. If something needs to be done, I'll make it happen.
At SocialCode, I worked as a contractor on some innovative new projects, and eventually signed on full time in 2016 to work as a team lead and senior staff engineer. I worked both in development and management, and implemented new process and architecture that resulted in positive changes to the structure of the company.
We Heart It acquired Quippery, and the team moved over. In the first few months, I restructured all of the client side code for the web app, pulling inline scripts out of templates and moving to commonjs. I wrote light architecture to let us continue using rails, but have modular views and controllers on the client for better user interaction. After the client side rewrite, I moved on to iOS where I worked on the app, and eventually spearheaded a rewrite that allowed the team to move much faster, use the latest iOS APIs, and quickly create and A/B new features.
Quippery was the core team at Embly - not so much a pivot as a pinterest style side project. I lead a team that created a responsive web & mobile web interface, a full featured API, fast image processing, and created an iOS app - all in around 20 days. I took the team from idea to MVP on a very tight schedule.
At Embly I was the first engineering hire, so I was responsible for architectural decisions, client side features & UX, deployment strategies, and everything in between. I used primarily javascript, both on the client and server, except when I was working with Objective-C, C, Java, or Shell Scripts. While at Embly, I also had the opportunity to help build a data analytics platform using LDA modeling and Support Vector Machine classification. I scaled Embly to handle millions of users' data & streaming posts, came up with clever workarounds to facebook's API call limits, and wielded caches and databases to support millions of updates without slowing the user experience.
At Vast.com I was hired as a Front End Engineer, and quickly became one of 2 lead Front End Architects to create a new platform for Vast to run partner sites on. I shifted the company to node.js from a php stack, and increased the front end speed by 2-3x. I became an authority on node.js and front end frameworks, and introduced design patterns and practices that will allow Vast.com to maintain their codebase for years to come.
I have always found that despite how much work I do for companies, I need to play with a new technology, develop an idea, or pick up some contract work. Since 2002 I have been working on everything from small sites and pet projects, to concept-to-completion for large clients.
At LMPN, I developed web applications, desktop applications, and served as the in-house server administrator and version control systems administrator. I created rich HTML5 media applications and custom live streaming components built on OSS. I spent most of my time working with Video Transcoding, Actionscript 3, PHP, Javascript, CSS, unix admin, and MySQL.
At Concentric Sky, I worked as a front end engineer, working in the django framework and javascript. I also worked as a Flash Developer, creating rich, api-powered, media-heavy apps.
At Creative Acceleration I worked primarily in Flash development, and spent most of my time with them writing clean as3 code for some very ambitious projects. Through Creative Acceleration I worked on a minisite for a major motion picture, and other large interactive projects. I worked on the full stack as well here - Back end and Front end programming, database and server administration.