The Modern Accounting Platform

The Giant Pixel was different than your average startup. We were building multiple projects that we hoped to spin off into their own companies. Our goal was to find people who are not just talented, but also entrepreneurial who will work on the projects and then be part of the founding team when we spin off the company. We shared experience, code, design and our office so we can get to making great products, and rebuilding the wheel to get things started. Our partners have founded and ran Yammer, Xoom, Geni and Eventbrite.I wrote a large portion of the backends of our projects, our reusable library of ruby gems, our release tools and brought my style of project management to the team.We ended with a few projects:Antenna http://anten.na - Personalized news and talk radio for your commute, workout and on-the-goNama http://namapm.com - Achieve project nirvanaSuccessful projects through transparency, feedback, and real-time communicationSoBo - The Social Soundboard, a social experience app based around audio.

Nama was modern project management with real-time messaging. As your team collaborates, messages are tied directly to your project or tasks, where they belong. No more using third party tools only to have information fall through the cracks.Nama uses instant feedback and a "no surprises" design philosophy to keep your entire organization up to date about what is – and is not – progressing in your project.With an emphasis on prioritization and communication, everyone always knows the most important thing to be working on at any given moment. In our experience, this is the only way to align teams with business goals.Nama is a beautifully designed, SaaS solution – free to join, and teams get up and running in minutes.

Welcome to the world of Local Business Intelligence!While there I : Drove to completion of an integration with a large media partner Created a team dedicated to high-output, dependability, and creativity. Revamped the project management process to remove uncertainty Extended our architecture to be able to handle and process millions of sources that were being analyzed using custom processors, Gearman, ElasticSearch, Membase and crawlers Created the process for normalizing geolocated information, local business, and geographic data Managed budget, partner talks, recruiting, etc. Worked hands on with engineers to solve issues and problems. Handled transition to new business model to change Fwix, a hyper local news source to Radius Intelligence.

Built pretty much everything with the help of a great designer and a web programmer.Backend in RoR.HTML5 version of Tello App with JQTouch (modified).PhoneGapp'ed version of Tello App for iPhone.Facebook/Twitter oauth connections.Facebook/Twitter publishers.EC2 datacenter.GeolocationMobileLaunched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010.

I was brought on at GameLayers to take over the CTO position from one of the founders. While there we made a change from a toolbar based MMO (PMOG) game that couldn't find revenue to developing facebook games. With 2 other engineers and 2 creative, we were able to get DictatorWars out the door in 9 weeks, architected by me such that we were able to get our next game Super Cute Zoo out in 4 weeks. The system here was a Ruby on Rails backend, XHTML/CSS/jQuery on the frontend. During that time I also moved our existing game completely over to Amazon EC2/EBS/ELB in about 3 days.What I did:Helped run the company with the 2 remaining foundersLed development of the new facebook gamesArchitected the underlying game engine to allow for easy skinning and rule changes.Hands on I built everything from payment processing to stats, optimized the backend, added a caching layer, facebook and twitter integration, etc.Also created our development system and configuration, managed the database, backups, staging system and live system. Generally did all the ops work.I ran the day to day project management of the entire team in getting the games out the door, handling requests and bugs, and prioritizing our ongoing tasks.

Doostang was written by a team of 15 in Russia. Delivery was too long, features were hit or miss, so the founders wanted to bring engineering local - so they hired me. With 6 engineers, we brought out a site in 3.5 months (released exactly on planned date), from an MS/SQLServer/ASP/C/.Net lbase to Ruby on Rails (with some Java/Lucene/Solr). Post launch ran product and engineering planning and scheduling, getting the team on a 2 week sprint, being more agile with more feedback.Besides managing, I was coding all the way. Helping the Russian team with ASP/.Net/C problems, I added a separate Python layer with SQLAlchemy and Elixir to add an ActiveRecord equivalent so I could add extra functionality to the site without waiting for the Russian team, including a method for filtering and validating outgoing invitations. Later, added the RoR framework, the dev build system (nginx, RoR, third party software), MySQL, and worked on pieces including the mail system and the admin/back office.

Xoom is taking on the remittance industry, providing an online consumer experience and a B2B solution allowing third parties to leverage Xoom's network. Helped the CTO bring his product to the next level. Started as Director over 1 engineer, 8 months later promoted to VP, with a staff of 30. Hired a dedicated VP of Eng and took over as CTO. Responsible for architecting, developing and directing (I'm still hands on - I wrote the ATM system in 3 months with a contractor for domain knowledge support) the core remittance platform including:Web site/cobrandsCompliance/FraudPayment ProcessingIntegrationsATMReportingFinanceSecurityCompleted an enormous amount of work with a lean staff.Designed the next generation system and datacenter.Ability to step in to any of my people's shoes and fill their roles, from software engineering, to datacenter management, to project management.Hired, reviewed and fired as necessary.Kept team as aggressive as possible.

Hands-on manager and lead of the backend document analytics system. System was a home-grown distributed grid, analyzing documents from all over the electronic world (web, closed caption feeds, monthly magazine edumps). When I joined the company's system was capable of analyzing ~15,000 documents a day with 6 machines. When I left, the grid was doing upwards of millions of documents a day, and had an archive of 100,000,000 documents. This included everything from crawling the web, parsing documents, third party integrations, internal analyzers, data-warehousing, terabytes of storage, and internationlization. Co-developer of sentiment analysis system using SVM's and decision trees. Took over the reigns from the CTO, grew the team to a lean-and-mean 4! and made the system self sustaining.

Tiny company of past-game industry folks trying to build a DirectX equivalent for hand held devices and cell phones. A few years too soon. Company ran out of cash. I was working on a COMish like version of an input system. Toward the end I also became involved with the server side of things and reviewed the architecture presented by an outsourced firm.

Yahoo kept a few of the original eGroups engineers to maintain the groups system.

dot com baby! eGroups was my first job delving into web development, python and a large group of engineers. I was mainly responsible for the code for all the pages on the web site, and did most of the porting to C when we were bought by Yahoo!. Worked with Apache, CGI's, python, C, MySQL, email, MIME, parsers, and developed the "wonder-tool", used to track our changes across 13 different languages. Jack of all trades here, just like everyone else.

Back in the day I knew more about the X Window System then most people could dream of. With my experience in cross platform architecture at Wolfram Research, I jumped into Brio's multi-platform team (ok, the team was 2 people, my manager and a contractor) and took over the unix version. I brought the code up to speed with the C++ spec, ported it to linux for fun, and took over all the reigns of both the Unix and Windows version after about 6 months. Also reworked the graphics and file subsystems so the application's group could have an easier time with graphical objects, windows, pens, colors, etc..Also helped the other teams in debugging both windows and unix issues, the main application, and just about anything else. Everything here was in C++.

First job out of college, actually worked for Wolfram during my last semester.I was brought on to write the Unix version of the Mathematica frontend after 2 other failed attempts. Our team started with 3 folks, and grew to about 7 or so. After that many years the code itself was in the 500,000 lines of code range (all C in those days...) What did I do there? Everything:Developed the first sellable version the Unix frontend for MathematicaDeveloped window-system level features to mimic other windowing systems (colors, printing, fonts)Ported Mathematica kernel to both Linux and BeOS for fun.Debug unix version kernel, MathLink.Became an expert with the X Window System, XT, Motif.Wrote a column for The X Advisor.Developed the Mathematica Graphics File format.Custom color handling for the X frontend.Developed cross-platform binary files.Self directed.Co-developed internal i18n code using unicode.What a time!