Facet Digital is a multifaceted design and development agency that specializes in creating intuitive product experiences.

As the VP of Engineering at Validas, I lead the charge in shaping our team, process, and technology to deliver on our vision of reducing Wireless Waste™ for large enterprises, SMBs, and everyday consumers.We were a distributed, work-from-home team of senior software engineers with a passion for making a difference in the world through technology. Our flagship consumer product, SaveLoveGive aimed to help consumers save money on their wireless bills, and help solve bigger problems in the world through charitable contributions.During my time at Validas I helped modernize our engineering tools and processes, build up our development team, focus our product launch schedule, and build out SaveLoveGive. On the front-end, we employed mobile-first responsive web design using modern frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and jQuery Mobile. On the backend we used NoSQL datastores such as Riak and Couchbase for highly-available user data storage and processing. It was a great opportunity to blend consumer-facing product design with "big data" analytics and high-availability system architecture.

As CTO of Be Labs (formerly Balassanian Enterprises), I was in the unique position to lead a lean, pragmatic development team that combined best practices and tried-and-true methodologies with leading-edge technologies to bootstrap multiple consumer-facing technology startups in parallel. By employing Lean Startup principles, I was instrumental in the development of MVPs for a number of portfolio companies, such as Strings.com (a luxury shopping site), PostOnTheWall (a location-based photo sharing app), and Be Raw (an organic juice company with technology underpinnings, now known as Vital Juice Co.).This was a fun position where I was able to influence product direction, make technology decisions, and still be a core individual contributor and get to have my hands on multiple projects at once.

I co-founded Strings, Inc. with Edward Balassanian in 2007. As CTO, I oversaw a 10-man product development and Q/A team, managed a 10-man offshore engineering team, and ran data center operations. Being a small team, I was also a key individual contributor to the development of the core technology.Our technology stack at Strings ranged from distributed behavioral data collection systems and "big data" predictive analytics algorithms, to modern Web 2.0 designs, social sharing, and privacy features. Upon initial PR launch, we were able to scale to collect millions of user behavior data points practically overnight, and generate valuable product and content recommendations for our users with our predictive discovery engine. Our highly-available, distributed web services architecture enabled us to leverage offshore development teams to build a rich ecosystem of apps and data-collection plugins.

Digbee was a short-lived experiment in 2006. I spearheaded a small R&D team who, in under a year, developed an online, distributed, multimedia synchronization service. This was comprised of a cross-platform, cross-device architecture, a fuzzy logic content-matching system, leading-edge Web 2.0 user interfaces, and integration with a number of popular media player applications and devices. The result was a user-friendly web services platform for accessing any content from any device that presaged “cloud storage” platforms such as Apple's iCloud.

As VP of Engineering at Implicit Networks, I was responsible for delivering the software for handheld media players and set-top boxes commissioned by Intel, AMD, Thomson Multimedia, and D-Link. These solutions implemented groundbreaking technology in the areas of multi-device synchronization, dynamic multimedia transcoding, and mobile user interfaces – predating AppleTV by a number of years.My software development work here was primarily done in C++ on top of embedded operating systems, with custom embedded build and continuous-integration testing tools being built in perl, python, bash, and GNU make.I was both the leader of the small engineering team, and one of the primary code contributors on our core technology. As the VP of Engineering I managed the development schedule and process, the quality of the product outcomes, helped close strategic deals and manage customer relationships, and was actively involved in continued maturation of our intellectual property portfolio.

I was the first engineer hired at BeComm, where I led the development of a next-generation operating system for digital devices. Over the years I grew into the roles of Senior Engineer, Chief Architect, and eventually Director of Engineering as the company grew.Always hands-on with the development of the core technology, I lead the skunkworks team to rewrite V2 of the entire system from scratch, and was instrumental in building a revolutionary new communications architecture. Our team applied this technology to solutions ranging from Intel’s web tablet and home audio solutions, to Eclipsys’s handheld clinical assistant devices, to Raytheon’s intelligence-processing defense contracts.BeComm gave me the opportunity to work on a very broad set of software challenges, ranging from device drivers, network protocols, and a custom schedulers, to multimedia codecs, window managers, and HTML user interfaces...and much, much more. Most of my work at BeComm was done in C/C++, with a smattering of perl and a home-grown scripting language that resembled early ECMAscript.During my tenure at BeComm, I was also a key contributor to over a dozen patents filed by the company covering our inventive work, and have three issues patents to my name.

In 1994, I was responsible for the University of Washington Health Sciences Center’s first foray into the emerging World Wide Web, beginning with building a tool for automatically converting legacy WAIS and Gopher data to HTML and publishing it on the web.I went on to pioneer early techniques for building database-based websites and interactive applications on the web at a time when this was considered groundbreaking. My work in building online teaching tools for graduate-level anatomy students was published in the Proceedings of the Symposium of Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC) and presented at their annual conference.Under an Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) grant from the NIH, I was responsible for developing one of the first web-based distributed image databases for radiologists and hematologists, which pushed the boundaries of web capabilities of the day, particularly with respect to security and HIPAA-compliance.Other projects included a drug interaction database for doctors, and semantic network systems to aid medical researchers in traversing the complex landscape of medical terminology.Most of my work at this job was done in C/C++, perl, and LISP, with some early Java entering the scene near the end.