Bennett Kolasinski Email & Phone Number

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Managed and mentored a high-performing team of mobile and web developers responsible for Fender's digital products, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment.Established and led the mobile team for Fender Play, Fender's online learning platform that offers guitar, bass, and ukulele lessons for players of all skill levels. Oversaw both in-house and external developers to deliver features in React Native as well as Swift/Kotlin.Worked closely with our in-house Platform team to develop services to power our ecosystem of apps using AWS Lambda and off-the-shelf SAAS providers.Took an active role in shaping the product roadmap, collaborating directly with VPs to prioritize development efforts and ensure alignment with business objectives.Spearheaded internal R&D initiatives, including the development of AI-based projects such as a listening engine. Developed web-based prototypes using React and Typescript.Managed the development of Fender Tune, a widely-used iOS and Android instrument tuner and practice app with millions of installs, optimizing its performance and user experience to meet the needs of musicians worldwide.Directed the development efforts for Fender Songs, an innovative app that automatically generated synchronized chords for users to play along with any song in their music library, enhancing the app's functionality and user engagement.Instrumental in driving continuous improvement initiatives, implementing best practices, and fostering a culture of learning and growth within the engineering team.

Developed two iOS apps from scratch, one entirely in Swift. Helped develop Ruby on Rails infrastructure for sending push notifications, processing payments with Stripe (including via ApplePay), and various other bits of plumbing to enable you to request a car wash with a couple taps on your phone's screen.

The easiest and most elegant way to get and manage video replies from your audience. (I worked on the iOS app and built a web app for content creators in Ember.js.)

Beverly Hills, California, Us

Managed a complete rewrite of the Live Nation iOS and Android apps. Also built some APIs in Rails; custom services in Sinatra to deliver recommendations, Passbook passes, and APNS notifications; set up CI environment for tests and internal builds of apps.

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Developed JibJab's first iOS app- JibJab Jr. on the iPad (now called StoryBots Starring You® Books)- an immersive, personalized storybooks app for children with beautiful animation. Now the flagship app in JibJab's Storybots lineup. (Also developed a handful of internal prototypes with some fun things like face detection using OpenCV.)I also worked on all sorts of plumbing, from maintaining a custom rendering pipeline on EC2 to process high-quality video renders on-demand of personalized content to creating a theming system that allowed JibJab to easily create seasonal content 'channels' on the site to the Javascript / CSS that powered the homepage.

New York, Ny, Us

Optimized custom CMS written in Merb (a precursor to Ruby on Rails 3); developed new WordPress-based sites and tools to migrate Merb content into WordPress

Created Hey Walkies (www.heywalkies.com), a social dog park finder iPhone app and website for NYC dog parks with an integrated Twitter-like chat feature that was featured on Martha Stewart and People Pets.Contributed to Gamestreamer, a massive Ruby on Rails platform for game distribution.Development of custom WordPress themes for magazine and hotel sites.

New York, Ny, Us

Ruby on Rails and PHP development for quite a few high-profile sites, including cacm.acm.org, redken.com, wish.org, sbk.com

New York, Ny, Us

Development and maintenance of high-traffic, multimedia-driven websites based on a hybrid Ruby on Rails / Wordpress platform.

Created internal system in Ruby on Rails to track recording sessions and projects that was used for nearly a decade. Also I ran some very interesting casting sessions and mixed some short films and assisted in mixing some nationally-run TV spots.

I was one of the two students selected from my Master's program for this opportunity. Studied the manipulation and customization of Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) to allow for accurate spatial perception of sounds from headphones. Developed MATLAB-based software for subjective testing.

Accepted into this highly competitive program to contribute to an open-source project and receive a stipend from Google for my participation while in graduate school. Worked on musical quality visualizations in an early C++ audio feature extraction tool that was the precursor to many popular tools that are widely used today.

Arlington, Va, Us

Master'S, Music Technology

Bs, Computer Science, Child Development