Portfolio

I have built a lot of stuff. And here are many, many examples.
I haveur block, write your own text and edit me.
Listenjay
listenjay.com
2019-20: Listenjay.com is the first podcast search engine. It indexes the actual content of the podcast and 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.
Live Ballot
liveballot.com
2019: LiveBallot is an online voting guide. It provides a personalized virtual ballot based on the voter's geographic location and registration. I did a technical and business review of the site in an effort to evolve the business model in keeping with its technical foundation, and then led a set of minor improvements to the UX designed to increase engagement. Hosted on AWS; MongoDB; go application. Strategy, UX/UX, eCommerce, Development
Steller
steller.co
2018-19: Steller.co is a travel wishbook and application (iOS and Android). The site is used widely by photo enthusiasts, especially in Indonesia, to post photos of their travels and inspire travel in others. Hosted on AWS/Heroku, postgres DB, with a tightly coupled React and native applications. ETA adopted this platform as part of a business pivot to travel inspiration, as opposed to commerce. I led the onboarding of a new Ukrainian development team and a rewrite of the application, including iOS and Android app deployments.
Technical Compliance Process, Daimler North America
Cloud and 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.
Stacked Skincare
stackedskincare.com
2018-19: Stacked Skincare is a premium skincare and beauty company that sells its products primarily through an online website. Originally a Shopify site, the company attempted a migration to Magento 2 cloud service, with poor results. I helped redirect the company's tech efforts to improve the situation, ultimately resulting in a return to Shopify. Strategy, UX/UX, eCommerce, Development
Expedition Travel Advisor
2017-2018: ETA was a two-sided marketplace that brokered luxury adventure travelers (Antarctica, Galapagos) to luxury adventure cruise providers (Scenic, Windstar). It was a startup built around three innovative pieces of technology: a scraper-based system that updated prices and sailings of luxury cruises; a scraper-based system that pulled publically available traveler information from social media; and an ML system that rated the liklihood that a travel inquiry would result in a sale. I led a fantastic team of remarkable developers that designed and built these systems, using AWS/Heroku, Mongo DB, Redis, Elastic Search, Keystone, Airtable and React. The tech showed a lot of promise, but the company pivoted the business model, and the project was abandoned.
Earth 911
earth911.com
2016-18: Earth 911 is a recycling site and database of national recyclers, with about 500K users. I was contracted to advise them on technical and media strategy. After reviewing their tech and programming strategy, I recommended changes to both that resulted in the sale of the company. It's a Wordpress site with a SQL backend.
hibu/Yell Group
hibu.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 Autos. The content on this channel was sourced from various suppliers in the auto industry, like Kelly Blue Book. We had to do a lot of integration with Automotive Suppliers in order to keep the reference content updated, and built a performant system (before REST) to query auto databases hosted by our suppliers.
  • MSN Lifestyles. Lifestyles was a heavy driver of advertising revenue, especially for Consumer Package Goods companies like Proctor & Gamble. So, yes--I've been to Cinncinnati, and yes, to Madison Avenue.
  • MSN Entertainment. Most of the programming content was sourced from media companies in Hollywood, which took a fair amount of care and feeding. On the other hand, I got to go to some cool parties in LA, so there is that.
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MSN Channels
liveballot.com
2009-12: The MSN Channels engineering group reported to me for about three years. There were many channels, so of which were temporary, but the main, persistent channels were Money, Entertainment, Sports, Autos, Lifestyles, Careers, and Health & Fitness. Sometimes the organization was strictly program managers, at other times, development and testing also reported to me. We had a broad and complex charter: First, of course, make sure the various channels were available and performant to users--MSN had over 400MM users/mo and very spikey traffic, which meant a lot of coordination with a separate infrastructure team. Second, an enoromus amount of coordination with sales and partners. We had many partners, some of which were very large organizations like Fox Sports, with a lot of revenue at stake--often the needs of these partners conflicted over the limited programming inventory and pixel space we had at MSN. It was even more complicated by Microsoft's own requirements for MSN, for example integration into bing and MSN Messenger. Third, we spent a great deal of time trying to refactor and optimize the various programming and content management tools we used--MSN channels had been born as separate websites with separate sets of tools, over 43 markets. So getting us to a single performant CMS was important. Luckily, the organization was well staffed--about 85 FTEs and several hundred contingent employees with offshore dev/test shops in China and India, so we had the resources to address our challenges. But that meant most of my time was spent managing the managers and insuring that our focus and resources were focused on delivering business results.
Chanel #5 Launch
Article on the Campaign
2009: For Chanel's 2009 release of its No 5 product, featuring the actress Audrey Tautuo, The MSN Branded Entertainment Team built an interactive takeover of MSN's homepage in 43 markets. Launched on a single day (5/5/2009), the takeover was seen by over 600 million people. This was a challenging project from a number of perspectives: the project didn't originate with BEET, and we had to come in and save it two weeks before launch with not one line of code working; the client spent several millions on the project and was very unhappy, and very particular about how its product would be presented; and I personally volunteered for the project and flew to London to supervise the launch, having to report back directly to MSFT leadership. So a lot of money and a lot of pressure, and I had to prioritized solutions and keep work moving. Turned out to be a huge success. Done in Flash, which was the RIA of the time, but also the source of most of our problems.
Nokia New Year's Eve
Article on the Event
2008: MSN hosted and coordinated a live webcast event sponsored by Nokia, which streamed peformances from five different New Year's Eve concerts around the world, featuring artists such as Black Eyed Peas, Nelly Furtado, John Legend, and Sergio Mendes. At the time, handling live streaming traffic at this level was unprecedented, and we were still in internal datacenters with MSFT IT configuring hardware, and we had to do massive testing anticipating the spikes in traffic and overall load. It was a huge technical undertaking, and required some diligent and professional coordination and planning. Ultimately, over 750000 people watched these concerts on MSN worldwide.
Rapid Responder
Venuetize Security Solutions
2016-2017: Rapid Responder was an emergency response application that allowed first responders to inventory geographic sites in advance of an emergency, and comply with preparedness regulations and statues. It was, unfortunately, a legacy Visual Basic application by the time I was asked to evaluate the tech stack, and after discussing the application and its use with its customers, I recommended a sale of the application, which was completed in 2017.
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.
Yellowbook
yellowbook.com
2012-14: The work at did at hibu on yellowbook deserves a separate discussion, because it was some of the most advanced engineering work I did, and my first experience with Search outside of Microsoft. It was a LAMP stack transitioning to ELK, and I learned a lot about Search, data migrations and build process courtesy of some very sharp developers as we evolved the system, which is still used by yellowbook today. We also built native apps for this service, and configured REST APIs, so it could be federated and used by third parties.
  • Appetite for Life, with Andrew Zimmern; mobile app, maps, social integration
  • Mr. Robinson's Driving School, starring David Robinson. Sponsored by Volvo. Interactive video. Geographic controls
  • It's Everyone's Business, featuring Jack and Suzy Welch. Sponsored by Microsoft. Nonlinear video; Video Subject Search; UGC controls.
  • In the Motherhood, starring Jenny McCarthy and Chelsa Handler. Sponsored by Suave. Nonlinear video; Video Subject Search; UGC controls; contest controls where users write scripts.
  • Fearless, Reality TV. Sponsored by GM/Hummer. Nonlinear video; Video Subject Search; UGC and social controls.
Web Video Programs
In The Motherhood
2006-12: The Branded Entertainment and Experiences team (BEET) sold a lot of sponsored web video series packages. The packages were usually sold as part of a broader, multimedia marketing campaign by the advertiser, so there were usually fixed deadlines for the release, which always made things challenging. The job of my team was to host them and add interactive features to make them compelling. It gave me a lot of experience in web and media hosting and infrastructure, which was not nearly as turnkey then as it is today. We adhered to a simple software development principle--get the package out on time and on cost, and then refactor the code so that controls and features became part of a white-label platform we could use on the next project. By doing this, we were able to sell a lot of packages and get them built quickly. By the time I left BEET we were producing around 45-50 packages a year. Some of packages featured celebrities like Jack Welch and Chelsa Handler; one of them, In The Motherhood, became a successful TV show on ABC.
MSN Money
money.msn.com
2009-2012: Of all the channels I worked on for Microsoft, MSN Money was by far the most challening. 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.
Dove.com
Venuetize Security Solutions
2007-2010: Dove.com was the project where I switched from Business Management for the Branded Entertainment and Experience Team (BEET) to engineering management. Dove and MSFT signed an multi-year, multi-million agreement that MSN would host the corporate website for Dove--which was a bad idea, because now Dove corporate and online presence was dependent on teams at MSFT that were not positioned as vendor support. To make matters worse, the vision of the functionality of the site was vastly oversold: they were promised an adaptive website that would reconfigure based on user profile and product engagement--technology that didn't really exist at the time. After two sets of engineering leads quit the project, I was asked to lead it, which I did, and then spent the next six months resetting expectations with the client, reassigning internal resources towards the project, and ultimately getting the site to work. After this, BEET typically sent PMs on final pitches with Sales to prevent Sales pitching ideas that were too costly to implement. We also started to build out the team, and the platform that would make BEET successful in the next few years.

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