Employment Status

HAPPILY EMPLOYED

My Work History

• RentJuice
• Playdom
• Pixelpipe
• Campus Kiwi
• Xillent
• Astreya
• Santa Clara
• Acc. Genie
• Azoff Design

• RentJuice

  Software Architect / Developer

  March 2011 - Present

  At RentJuice, I enjoy a senior role as software architect - managing and developing atomic verticals for our emerging product feature set. One such vertical I chaperoned, The Facebook and website widget product, enabled property managers and landlords to expand their reach to new media. The project received a fair bit of press, some of which can be found here.

  In addition to consumer facing features, I also created several tools used internally to improve workflow and minimize regressions as the product grew. For instance, I developed, deployed, and managed the internal continuous integration (CI) framework, which I built using Java and the open-sourced Selenium WebDriver toolkit. After developing the framework, I also managed hand-off and training of the CI framework with the quality assurance department.

  Today, I still manage the aforementioned projects, and I continue to build out the core product with a great team.

• Playdom

  Software Architect / Developer

  January 2010 - March 2011

  At Playdom, my primary function is building and maintaining the social-network integration framework for games coming out of the San Francisco studio. I packaged the framework into a reusable SDK, which Playdom uses to rapidly create social games, on an agnostic platform.

  I leveraged this framework to help develop Market Street, a highly successful game that runs agnostically on several leading social networks. While it was the first game to come out of our San Francisco studio, Market Street was surprisingly Playdom's DAU (Daily Average User) leader within weeks of its launch. As a result of its unexpected popularity, I was fortunate (or unfortunate depending on your experience) enough to experience the growing pains of a rapidly scaling application. This experience put me in a position to build tools, and establish practices, that gave us a greater visibility into Market Street as it worked in production. Consequentially, we were able to quickly react to problems users where seeing on the live application, and respond accordingly.

  Finally, I was at Playdom during the The Walt Disney Company's acquisition and transition into the Disney Interactive Media Group. Besides being an amazing experience, and putting Playdom in the news, the buyout showed me what it takes to compete in the "Social Gaming" space.

• Pixelpipe

  Lead Designer / Software Developer

  July 2009 - January 2010

  My role at Pixelpipe ranged anywhere from backend ops to front-end design. I got to work with many social APIs and integrated them in ways that targeted extensibility and growth. As a result of being part of a small team, I was able to lend a hand in many parts of a distributed, social web-application. However, the most important benefit of being able to work at all levels of the stack, was that it allowed me to come up with consistent methods of handling scalability. As a result of this hands-on experience, I was able to better recognize the ripple effect, for instance the effect memcaching at the data layer has on AJAX methods in the user-interaction layer.

  Pixelpipe helped me learn that being a "specialist" is not always a good thing. Admittedly, without the help of a great CTO, I would have not been able to learn this on my own. I was able to implement production code in a host of programming languages, including Python and Java. In addition, I was able to develop a mobile service extension for Pixelpipe, on the Palm WebOS platform. It was my first attempt at building a mobile app, and actually won a award for one of the best Palm apps of 2009.

• Campus Kiwi

  Software Architect / Developer

  June 2009 - September 2009

  CampusKiwi was the first job I landed out of college after my senior year. CampusKiwi was started by a classmate, and only existed as an outsourced proof-of concept when I arrived. Together, with the help of a small product team, I helped to implement a new user interface, as well as clean up existing security issues and bugs. Most of my work was done in some part of the LAMP stack, but I had a particular focus in code-reuse and separation of concerns

  These days, I mostly work as a consultant for CampusKiwi, helping where and when I can.

• Xillent Studios

  Lead Web Developer

  September 2007 - June 2009

  I consider Xillent my first real programming job. I started as a part-time intern my sophomore year of college, and by the time I was graduating, I had moved up to the position of lead developer. I worked mainly using Microsoft web technologies (ASP/ASP.NET) which, in retrospect, gave me a good idea of their strengths/weaknesses vs. open-sourced technologies. I also developed ads and a video player in flash in addition to my regular work.

  Besides being a programming job, Xillent also gave me my first experiences managing myself and others. Most of my projects were time-boxed, so development with a team was a concerted effort. It was an effort I personally failed at multiple times before gaining the confidence to manage projects on my own. These days, I owe most of my confidence in my self-management to the experience I gained from Xillent.

• Astreya Partners

  Tech Stop Administrator

  April 2007 - September 2007

  I worked for Astreya during the summer between my freshman and sophmore year of college. When I applied, I had no idea what Astreya was, other than a recruiting agency for ops talent. Having a short history in ops, I applied and was surprised to find out that Astreya was currently contracted by Google to handle operations in Google's Mountain View office. I was promptly stationed in Mountain View, participated in training, and became a full-fledged "Tech Stop Administrator" by mid-summer.

  My roles as a Tech Stop Administrator included standard operations tasks such as internal DNS management, hardware fulfillment, and tech service for the engineers in the building I worked in. Astreya was a great experience, and though it did not help me much as a developer, it solidified my troubleshooting skills and whet my appetite for working in the silicon valley tech industry.

• Santa Clara University

  Help Desk Administrator

  September 2006 - April 2007

  Working for my alma mater was a personal first attempt at applying my educational focus to my vocation. My primary roles included helping students with technical problems, running anti-virus software on infected computers, and maintaining the student computer lab. I also wrote a custom script suite that automated the task of running anti-virus on computers and generating reports.
  

• Accessory Genie

  Product Graphic Designer / Market Research

  June 2006 - September 2006

  I started work at Accessory Genie as a market researcher, but slowly transitioned into a graphic design role through a small affinity for Photoshop. I began by making small enhancements to the site's graphics and eventually ended up creating the graphics for our catalog.
  

• Azoff Design

  Freelance Web Developer

  September 2005 - Present

  Goin' strong for years now