All things frontend for Wavefront @ VMware, from product and UX, to leading the F/E team, to creating performant visualizations and dashboards with lots of data.

I lead front-end engineering at Shocase, a professional network for marketers featuring news, people, projects and jobs. We create and manage the releases of our desktop, mobile and native iOS clients. Some highlights include:Creating and building Shocase’s native iPhone app from scratch. As part of the development I identified the core desktop functionality that would lend itself to a mobile experience. Several iterations of different parts of the app were developed which produced a new mobile friendly search experience and numerous different versions of the project page to display a creatives or marketers work.Meeting with customers to listen to their work challenges and capture their requirements.Influencing product decisions and roadmap, defining many of our features including the news feed that delivers topics as well as social network based news updates.Building out our analytics systems to measure growth and engagement to make data-based product decisions. I used a combination of a common JSON-based schema with Splunk. We’ve been able to answer (most) questions without having to go back and re-instrument the code.Iterating on existing features as well as coming up new ones to improve engagement and retention, including AB testing them using our own analytics.Re-working the onboarding and main sign-up pages. The flows were modularized to enable easily customization of onboarding as well as provide drop-in sign-up experiences for different methods and audiences. This change not only increased our overall signup rates but also increased the number of "complete" profiles for new customers.

Fun with NodeJS, Elastic Search, Ansible, AWS, jQuery, and Bootstrap

As with any startup I worked on a wide variety of problems to increase growth and provide great user experiences, including:iOS phone and tablet application (native implemention). Taking advantage of push notifications and more frequent increased engagement from mobile users the app received over 1M downloads in 6 months and produces more engagement per user than any other interface available across Polyvore.Mobile HTML site. Created a new version of Polyvore that is more suitable for consumption on smart phone devices, iOS and Android.Distribution and blogger loop. Target platforms included Pinterest, Facebook, Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr. We created streamlined flows for getting bloggers to embed content on their site and optimized for engagement on each platform. Each embed contained SEO terms that drove traffic back to Polyvore.Open Graph integration. Worked with Facebook as a launch partner for their first open graph platform.Facebook Outfitter app. Over 3 months we created nearly 10 variations of a Facebook web application to create a viral experience by letting friends create collages of cloths and photos for other friends.

Innovation, prototyping, pushing the edge. Wearer of many hats.In 2008-2010, I defined, evangelized and lead a small team to create the YQL platform and language. YQL acts as data glue, using a familiar SQL like syntax and an open specification of "tables" to let developers join and access any data on the internet in a consistent and simple manner. In 2010 we received the Yahoo Superstar award for this product. In 2006-2007, as part of the core Pipes team, I developed the Pipes Editor, a state-of-the-art ajax/DHTML browser based IDE for creating and editing data mashups, or "pipes". The Pipes launch was hailed by Tim O'Reilly as a "milestone in the history of the internet". In 2006 I co-developed the Checkmates mobile application for telling your friends where you are and seeing where they are on a scrolling mobile map - even using custom maps inside of buildings. The base of this code was later integrated into Y!Go, a suite of mobile Yahoo!'s products including a local maps application.

In 2003-2004 I architected, developed and lead a 4 person team to produce the AnySpot product prototype - a web service platform for ubiquitous access to any file and folder and the ability to share them on an ad-hoc basis. The system has been favorably received at all levels of top management in FX, and is was evaluated by several product groups, including integration into one core FX product.In 2002 I managed and developed the SwapDV open source project for sharing content between digital video recorders. The project immediately attracted 6 external developers, and had over 3000 downloads in just 2 months with 20,000 web hits. The software was featured on several popular technology community web-sites such as slash.org.In 2001 I lead 3 people to develop “PIPs”, which combined RFID identification and network level security to customize shared public device interfaces, like podiums and MFPs. The technology was recently the feature article of ACM Interactions Magazine.In 2000 I jointly developed m-Links, a “phonetop” web browser for applying services to links, and explored business opportunities outside of FX. We pitched, with positive responses, at Yahoo, Inktomi, and DoCoMo, and arranged a trial with Yahoo.

Site manager for a European Esprit funded project “eSCAPE: Electronic Landscapes” (project #25377). I was responsible for both coordinating local site research activities and the development of concept demonstrators in my role as site manager. The eSCAPE project investigated the exploration and development of the concept of an “electronic landscape” as a virtual environment that provides interconnections to other virtual environments. A number of themes were central to my research in this project, including:· the provision of user-interfaces to enabling novice users to build semantically rich, complex and persistent worlds;· developing mechanisms and infrastructures to support large or infinite virtual landscapes, including the use of active pre-caching strategies and semantic culling algorithms to provide seamless boundaries;· supporting cooperation and data sharing between heterogeneous applications and systems through the use of tuple spaces;· providing generic and extensible session management facilities to allow the location and launching of cooperative applications through supporting services on the World-Wide Web.In addition to driving my own research agenda as site manager I was responsible for the development of a coherent site wide research strategy, and coordinating the activities of those involved in the research, to ensure that the aims and objectives of the research are met. This includes the development of new research initiatives, planning how best to resource different areas of research and general responsibility for Lancaster’s commitments in the project.

Research fellow at the GMD FIT.CSCW research institute, employed under the European Commission Human Capital Mobility Program. My work focused on investigating the potential and pitfalls of the World Wide Web for supporting group work and CSCW within the framework of the BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) project (partially funded under contract TE2003 of the Telematics Application Program). Working initially in a three and then nine-member team I was heavily involved in the development and deployment of the BSCW system and jointly responsible for the research strand of the project. The BSCW system provides cross platform collaborative information sharing on the WWW using a file manager metaphor with discussion forums, activity awareness, and member administration. A number of themes were investigated during this period at GMD, including:· Exploring the limits of the current WWW architecture and standards· Investigating the advantages and disadvantages of the WWW for the deployment of applications, especially CSCW applications.· Extending the WWW to better support awareness and synchronous communication· Defining and managing of groups in a collaborative systemThe BSCW system was awarded the first prize in the European Software Innovation Award (ESIP '96) competition in December 1996.

Research Assistant, Computing Dept., Lancaster University, U.K. (Aug. 1994-Feb. 1995)Research Assistant for the Ariadne Project. While completing my Ph.D. I developed parts of the Ariadne system. The Ariadne project, funded by the HEFCs JISC New Technologies Initiative, concentrates on two novel areas of computer based support for information retrieval: visualization of the search process and collaborative browsing. The system aimed to observe, record and analyze the collaborative learning process and to enhance the opportunities and effectiveness of the collaborative learning that already occurs. It provides this using transparent data capture of a user’s database session, followed by an enhanced playback of the session.

PhD. thesis on “Infrastructural Support for CSCW”. The thesis investigates the problems with existing support for CSCW applications and services at both the distributed system level and the more purpose built cooperative environments. The thesis presents a more “lightweight” and policy free model to supporting CSCW, called COLA. This model has been developed and realized on top of the ISIS distributed systems toolkit and its services are usable through several X-windows browsers and a variety of libraries. A number of research themes were explored by the thesis, including:· Finding the requirements for basic technical support for CSCW applications and services.· Facilitating an awareness of information and actions within cooperative environments.· Extracting the useful aspects and features of Distributed systems and Object models to support sharing.· Investigating the relationship between shared user interfaces and more fundamental support for CSCW.· Using a separation of cooperative semantics from the supporting mechanisms which those semantics drive to support a wide-variety of possible CSCW applications.· Extracting the shortcomings of existing CSCW application models to construct a generic platform for supporting cooperative applications.During the Ph.D., time was spent at British Telecom. Labs, Martlesham, where the COLA model was applied to a Quality Assurance Process (Summer 1992) and in a spatial (VR) setting (Summer 1993). The COLA model benefited in its development from participation in the COMIC Esprit Basic Research Project (6225). The COMIC project examined many different facets of CSCW, from ethnographic studies of the real-world cooperative work to how CSCW applications can be technically supported (e.g. the COLA platform).