Worked directly with small- and medium-sized companies to either write and design custom software or to teach their leaders how to develop and retain high-performance (especially remote and distributed) technology teams.

Led a range of dedicated Technology teams through the acquisition of the company, the complex launch of a new ERP system powering our core subscription offering, and the rebirth of our retail ecommerce platform. Guided and helped implement consolidated product, engineering, and IT functions following acqusition. Managed multimillion dollar budget and contributed to all aspects of the business strategy and execution as a member of the executive team.

Returned to FlatWorld to continue improving their online homework system, the flagship product. Replaced external development team with internal staff as the system expanded to thousands of courses and millions of student attempts. Transitioned the entire architecture to Kubernetes and Docker to improve the speed and quality of engineering. Recruited a diverse team of engineers, including my successor, to support the company following my departure.

Rebuilt the Technology team (from one engineer) and restarted product development at a high-quality, low-cost college textbook publisher following an acquisition. Recruited then guided the new team through a systematic retirement, improvement, or redevelopment of every component of existing architecture. Significantly improved code quality, information security, infrastructure automation, availability, and product design.Launched, tested, and scaled a brand new online homework system with an external development team. Even though it was a homework system, careful product management and listening to customer feedback led 77% of students surveyed to report it provided a ”moderate to significant positive impact on their learning.”

Led the integration of two Technology departments of more than 60 during acquisition and then merger of Safari Books Online by O’Reilly Media and defined the technical strategy for the new, unified platform. Shifted the focus of teams and product development to win larger and larger B2B customers and developed new security and data privacy policies and practices to support that shift. Launched significant projects throughout the integration (like a reporting dashboard for customers and Oriole Online Tutorials) and continued progress on the microservices transition (Docker in production and Kubernetes).

Led a distributed Technology department of more than 50 (including software, systems, data, and QA engineers) to rapidly expand the new Safari platform. In response to a need to increase the pace of our output for customers as we scaled, I designed a new system for the entire product development effort based on small, autonomous teams and changed to that setup alongside a deliberate architectural shift toward microservices. Established and spread a culture of postmortems throughout the organization for continuous learning and feedback (held more than 85 postmortems in 2015) to achieve reliability and performance goals.

Transformed an Infrastructure group (better output, morale, and relationships) into a cohesive, high-performance team through a focus on continuous improvement, transparency (like sprint “budgets”), and infrastructure automation (with Chef).

Technical lead for Safari Flow as it transitioned out of beta, scaled, and then became the primary “new” Safari for customers (including small B2B customers) in the summer of 2014 (as part of a massive rebranding).

Following the acquisition of Threepress and Ibis Reader by Safari Books Online, led a team of developers to build Safari Flow, an entirely new B2C membership platform for learning built on top of the Ibis Reader technology and Safari Book Online’s massive library of technical and business videos and books (what would become “new” Safari). Launched the beta of Flow in 2013. Helped establish the public face of Safari for recruiting and standards development through speaking, writing, and open source/standards work. [Python (Django), JavaScript, and XSLT]

The IDPF develops and maintains the EPUB and EPUB 3 standards for digital books and supports the digital publishing industry.

Provided expert consulting and training to publishers, digital distributors, and reading system creators on EPUB, DocBook, XML, and digital authoring. Developed custom software for content distribution automation and digital reading. [Python (Django), JavaScript, and XSLT]

Designed, built, and launched Ibis Reader, the first pure HTML5 ebook reader for desktops, phones, and tablets with full offline support as part of a founding team of two. After worldwide user growth and feature enhancement, we licensed and integrated the underlying platform into a number of other applications (like the highly accessible etextbook platform from Don Johnston). This company was tremendously more successful than my first, in part through our focus on customers, and lead to an acquisition of the technology, platform, and team by one of our customers, Safari Books Online. [Python (Django), JavaScript, and extensive use of HTML5 APIs]

Developed software and systems that allowed O’Reilly to transform the way they published electronically, which enabled the creation of hundreds of ebook apps in the early days of the Apple and Android app stores. Also served as a public face for the company in work on open source and open standards. [Python, Ruby, XSLT, and XQuery]

Converted manuscripts into publishable formats, working with a team to research, develop, and test improvements and new features for conversion tools. Provided user support to authors, editors, and production editors who used a range of text and layout tools and templates.

Designed, built, and launched, as part of a team of four co-founders, a complex web application to enable musicians to connect with groups of fans by geography (and other factors). Member of the second YCombinator “class.” The company and the product ended up failing, but it taught me a great deal about how to build products. [JavaScript and Scheme, because we were foolish]