Vic Bondi 
Business Technologist

What's a business technologist? Someone who knows the technology you need for your business, and the business you need for your technology.

View My Work

I build

Stuff.

About that Stuff:

I’m Vic Bondi. Twenty years plus in the software industry with enough experience to get the job done.

I was an assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. I had written and edited a series of reference encyclopedias called American Decades. They brought me to the attention of Microsoft, which offered me a job on Encarta Encyclopedia (my phone machine actually negotiated my contract for me). That started me on my software career, which includes two stints at MSFT, three sold companies, one company that went bankrupt, and a range of activity that has gone from content creation to infrastructure configuration.

For the past 10 years I've kept a steady clip of consulting.  Large companies, midsized, startups--I've done them all. 

But mostly I've firejumped: companies in distress because their tech got in the way of their business, usually due to legacy systems or processes that had been outmoded by events. That requires the skill of a Business Technologist.

Focus: I do this work fast. Depending on your product and size of business, I can get the job done anywhere from a weekend to a quarter. I can do the work against deadlines, and against a lot of pressure. I'm not here to waste your time or money. 

Stuff I have Written that you can Read:

What Do You Need?

Business Evaluation

Rapid evalution of the key drivers of your business, and the product requirements you have for success. Got 90 mins? -- I can give you options.

Technical Assessment

Technical evaluation of your architecture, your development and deployment processes, and your team capabilities. Wondering what's the weakest link in your architecture? Give me one week, and I will report.

Project Management

Planning, staffing, and administering your teams and working collaboratively towards fantastic outcomes. Scaling or shifting your org? I can tell you how to do it within 30 days without damaging your core business.

Product Optimization

By reviewing your data, your marketing, your sales motion, I can optimize your product and its development, and minimize your cost in time and expense. Use GA? -- I can tell you three things you don't know about your product.

Project Highlights

Here are some of the best projects I've worked on.  To view the entire portfolio, click on "View More"

listenjay.com
listenjay.com/home
2019-20: Listenjay.com is the first podcast search engine. It indexes the actual content of the podcast is keyword searchable, so you can find subjects and topics within the podcast. I created the site, designed the technical approach and led the team that built it. Hosted on GCP/Heroku; postgres DB; ElasticSearch; with a node/vue.js front-end; Auth0. Also has an outstanding vue.js CMS that allows editors to manage podcasts, edit transcripts, and program the site and social media.
Technical Compliance, Mercedes Benz
Cloud & Connectivity Group, Mercedes Benz Research
2020: The Cloud and Connectivity group in Daimler North America hired me to develop a process that would allow their agile engineering software development process to release software compliant with various data protection, IP, software security and safety processes, including ISO, NIST, GDPR and CCPA. I analyzed all requirements and conducted technical reviews with development teams to understanding their output and process. I reengineered the product development process and created a set of JIRA requirements that allowed PMs to address compliance systematically and at the start of each project, enabling them to release software against an agile cadence, and at the same time be in compliance.
Cheezburger
cheezburger.com
2014-17: Cheezburger was the first Meme-based comedy website, with a huge scale audience (~30MM/mo in 2012) and received enormous attention and a large venture investment when it was founded in 2007. By the time I was asked to review its tech stack and programming approach, the site was crashing 2-3 times a week, and losing 30% traffic month over month. It was a bootstrap/.net/ES/ application sitting on an absolute horror show infrastructure. First order of business was establishing a data baseline on infrastructure performance; we then used tools like New Relic to monitor the system, intervene before it failed and then reset both the hardware and software configurations. We radically simplified the backend and moved it to a private AWS cloud, and then redesigned the frontend, contantly iterating the navigation and design scenarios by tracking their effects in Google Analytics and by reaching out to our audience. We stablized the performance of the application and stack, regrew our audience, and ultimately sold the property to Literally Media in 2016, after which I stayed on another year trying to fix a constructive advertising approach for all Literally properties, using header/bidder, DFP, and Adwords. Cheezburger was the first time I did a lot of direct DevOps work, which meant I learned a lot about infrastructure development and deployment, and I lost a lot of sleep. ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat
hibu
stackedskincare.com
2012-2014: I was hired as the engineeing lead for the digital products division at the moment that the Yell Group, which comprised Yellowbook.com in the US and the Yellowpages elsewhere in the world, was rebranding itself and transitioning from selling print phonebooks to selling digital products such as websites, SEO/SEM, and identity provisioning. It was a heavy lift. Yell's sales organization had optimized its motion against the sale of print ads, and its technical infrastructure had been laid against managing print products--in a proprietary data center, on Oracle based datastores that were often configured for archaic hardware. In six different markets, with six difference audience demands. And with a huge debt overload that placed incredible burdens on resources and revenue realization. So there were a host of business problems here overlaying my effort to update and improve the technical foundation and key value propositions of our consumer products. We spent a lot of time unsuccessfully trying to move the infrastructure to the cloud, but I did learn a lot here, especially about working with Sales, and making them effective Product and Engineering partners. We also built a marvelous datalake for SEO keywords in Hadoop, and I took my first steps in understanding ML and data mining at hibu. I also worked with some fantastic engineers, in the US, UK and Spain, and learned an enormous amount about modern engineering approaches from them.
MSN Money
money.msn.com
2009-2012: Of all the channels I worked on for Microsoft, MSN Money was by far the most challenging. By the time I joined, the backend of the site was a decade old, and failing constantly, and for good reason: realtime stock updates is technically quite challenging. And when your users rely on those updates to inform them when to make trades, you have a huge problem if the stock ticker is unavailable or the price is delayed. So we basically had to reengineer the product, in partnership with our feed provider, Morningstar. We had a great team working on this as well, and were eventually able to renovate the backend and the site.