David Blackman Email & Phone Number

Amsterdam, Nh, Nl

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Search and backend development consulting for startup and midsize technology companies.

New York, United States

Building the next generation all-in-one workspace / knowledge management tool / 1970s back to the future hypertext platformHeading up the NYC office (we're hiring)Search Quality / Performance / Unwanted Content / Docs and Wiki Features- Built numerous internal trust & safety / spam tools, maintained and documented internal administrator tooling- Lead a team of engineers in developing two week formal onboarding curriculum, built the first codelab- Split notion's public content onto a separate domain for increased resilience- Decreased search latency by over 50%, increased relevancy by over 10%- Oversaw implementation of first machine learning model in the product (search ranker)- Implemented user recommendation model in the product (used by both user search and document search ranking)- Implemented engineering workflow / developer-experience tooling- Maintained notion internal developer CLI- Site lead: Grew NYC from no office to 150+ people in an office in Soho. Implemented NYC onboarding, site updates, offsites and lunch-and-learns,- Migrated elasticsearch from AWS managed to self-hosted terraform for cost savings, architecture flexibility & performance improvements- Implemented observability dashboards and tooling for search indexing & serving- Improved korean, english and japanese stemming in document search- Created search experimentation framework- Created search backend routing framework- Implemented comments sidebar with improved unread comment tracking

New York, United States

- Implemented significant improvements to developer tooling & testing- Heading up efforts to roll out a full suite of geo APIs mainly from open source efforts - Evaluated multiple open source routing engines, built production/deployment tooling around two of them - Integrated new source of geographic data across multiple services - Made contributions back to pelias open source geocoder

Built initial backend for book club reading app, transitioned project to full time developer.

Took over in progress social network + marketplace app from a consulting firm. Rebuilt site with industry best practices + much larger feature set.

Built proof of concept for a new kind of list building application, billed as "wirecutter for everyone." https://www.mixlet.com/

Brooklyn, Ny

Exploring the intersection of generative art, immersive experiences, connection and physical accessories.Selected projects:- Assemble: an immersive theater piece set in the Red Hook IKEA https://blackmad.com/digital-projects/assemble/ - featured in No Proscenium, Time Out and Gothamist- What is my purpose? asingle-page postcard app for my friends http://purpose.blackmad.com- Blackmadeco: generative art patterns on custom fit leather accessories http://gen1-alpha.blackmade.co/- Dispatches From Yesterday's Future - expo/react-native app in Apple app store to share feelings & memories from quarantine - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yesterdays-future/id1507282393?ign-mpt=uo%3D4- ~ secret immersive temporary covid-19 virtual art project ~

Greater New York City Area

Oversaw development of Twitter Moments feature from initial conception to launch to unification into Events experience.- Managed a team of 20 backend & frontend engineers across two offices and multiple remote locations- Launched v1 in a tight six month timeframe, followed by rapid iteration- Set a model within Twitter for speed & quality of product delivery and for team cohesion- Outsourced & oversaw development of internal editorial tools by a third party development firm- Worked with a team of editors & curators to build policy and tooling for human curated content on Twitter- Launched in 15+ countries. Saw continuous growth of usage and stickiness over 2+ years- Organized efforts into multiple sub-teams with multiple PMs and TLs, lead sprint planning and retrosLead growth of NYC engineering from ~40 to ~90 people- Introduced every new hire to the office- Met with every new hire & coordinated first day with manager- Started site-wide new hire orientation

Greater New York City Area

Oversaw the development of Foursquare's venue database and tooling- Built out geographic infrastructure, including the open source coarse geocoder twofishes, funding Quattroshapes - an open source administrative boundary compilation, and signing a deal with a third party fine geocoder- Wrote or oversaw almost all of the crowd sourced venue editing tools in use by Foursquare, including the launch of a mobile editing webview in use by the client apps- Added hours, attributes (good for groups / delivery / etc) and local name translations to venue database capabilities- Expanded category hierarchy by 2x, worked with external icon illustrator- Launched event checkins, which involved matching venues with multiple external event providers, deduplicating venues across multiple providers- Built numerous internal tools including what became s2map.com as well as the venue shape visualization seen in most public presentations- Managed a team of 5 people owning all of the venues, events, geocoding, tooling and superuser infrastructure