I lead a group of 100+ engineers in the Engagement Mission of the New York Times, which is responsible for connecting the work of the world's best journalists to the Times' audience—including our content management tools, the nytimes.com website, and the surfaces of our mobile and other native applications.

I've joined the New York Times to work on a brand-new product for parents, working on a small cross-functional team as we build a larger group, a better set of tools for new parents, and a more mindful, effective process for collaboration and work.

Host of the annual LeadDev NY conference

After Editorially wrote its farewell blog post, Trei Brundrett reached out to us to see if we might fit in at Vox Product. Though the three Editorially founders had discussed acquisitions with several firms, Vox was the only one that the three of us all agreed we would have taken jobs at independently. We undertook a project, still underway, to rethink the legendary Chorus CMS here, and I've since moved heavily back into the management of engineers, leading a team of sixteen full-stack engineers charged with advancing engineering efforts in content management, presentation, programming, and distribution on both our platforms and our partners'. Vox is rightly revered for the tight connection between its Product staff and the Editorial side of the business, and I count myself lucky to have been able to make tough product decisions in the interest of driving better newsgathering.

Our goal was to make the very best tool for writers — one that helps you collaborate, and so helps you write better — while also taking advantage of the best the web has to offer. We built a gorgeous "hinted Markdown editor", which was probably the most complicated piece of software I had ever worked on, and which our users loved. With a team of four engineers, we assembled a version-controlled, collaborative writing environment that lavished tons of attention on the writing _around_ the writing—discussions and comments on specific changes in the text, a dashboard that could tell you the entire history of how a document unfolded, and multiple export formats—including direct WordPress and Dropbox integrations. Unfortunately, while we had devoted users (who, years later, still bemoan its loss), after two years we couldn't generate enough money to continue to pay our employees fairly and deliver on our promises, and we folded the product with a degree of humility and care that I'm still proud of.

Through a side interest in custom photo CMSes, I was drawn into 20x200 initially as a side project. With founder Jen Bekman and Raul Gutierrez, I helped bootstrap a limited-edition art e-commerce site built largely with Movable Type templates and custom Perl CGIs. After raising a round in 2009, the company scaled quickly, and we were ultimately able to build tons of features, including real-time inventory integrated into the product pages, a custom gift certificate and marketing system, A/B testing of features and pricing, shipping optimization, framing workflows, and an autoscaling Amazon Web Services hosting architecture. In 2011, we refactored the platform into a Rails app with zero downtime. Incredibly proud of the work this team did, and of the engineers who participated.

As part of a three-person engineering team, I helped spin up Hearst Digital Media's inaugural Perl/Mason engineering efforts: A successful and flexible web-based subscription system, and a multitenant CMS supporting user-defined content types and (initially) a dozen publications—both well ahead of their time. Over time, I hired ten new engineers and led the full-stack engineering team as the broader magazine group pivoted hard towards digital properties. Though Hearst doesn't get the attention that other media engineering teams do, the work that group did on both subscriptions and CMSes was definitely groundbreaking. I adopted Git here, to the consternation of the Operations team.

Primedia was a stop between the music business and a viable media company. I was brought on by the engineering team there to help manage their e-commerce platform, but I ended up working on their content systems as well. My tenure there was not long, as a management shake-up resulted in my being shuttled off to Hearst.

This place was, by all appearances, a record store on the Lower East Side, but it was also an unusually successful e-commerce record store on the internet. I fled into its arms, jaded, in the malaise of the tech industry circa 2001, and quickly realized that they would not stop me from simply rebuilding their e-commerce site from scratch, so I did that. Audio samples, promotional deals, batch and deferred shipping, integrated mailing lists, and a custom inventory management system distinguished this site from its predecessor. I was _this close_ to building a digital downloads site, and I probably should have, as the rewards would far have outweighed the risks in hindsight. Nevertheless, it was successful until the British Pound spiked and made the import of ungainly vinyl records unsustainable. They later pivoted the site—with my assistance—to menswear, which is a really great story to hear about over beers.

I actually worked at Tekserve as a desktop repair technician when I first arrived in New York City in 1996, leaving briefly for an ill-fated stint at Arena Networks. They were kind enough to hire me back after the bubble burst, and I helped them make the process of deploying new repair and sales workstations easier, building a very early example of a NetBoot-driven workplace—all the while continuing to repair computers for the devoted Mac-using populace of the city of New York. I learned more about how to work and how to be empathic in my work at Tekserve than at any other job I've ever had.

Arena hired me just as the bubble reached its zenith. Arena was a community platform play that was just about eight years ahead of its time—the idea was that small banks could build an online community and support presence without having to build it themselves, and while still maintaining a degree of design flexibility that would set them apart from their competitors. I spent half a year there honing my Perl skills (with some of the world's foremost Perl developers) and writing chatbots for IRC systems that clients could use to host talks with financial experts (take that, contemporary bot resurgence!) I learned a lot about premature optimization of marketing here.