Group Tech Lead in Consumer / Core Experience at YelpThe Core Experience Group is responsible for the Home, Search Results, and Business Details pages on Yelp (on iOs and Android and Web, ex. Home on web).It's nice to be focused on programming/architecture (and the consumer web) again. :-)

PHP is the most popular website development language and among the top 10 most popular programming languages, it powers sites such as Facebook, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and WordPress.I've been giving talks on web development, user growth, and operations since 2003 and have been a featured keynote speaker at many PHP conferences in the US and Europe. Please see my talks on Slideshare.

Clara Health seeks to be the most trusted partner in furthering any healthcare journey. It does this by creating a patient-first platform to connect people to clinical trials and empowers them to access the most advanced healthcare available.I managed all of engineering including hiring and career development at a pre-Series A startup through post-Series A. This included: building out replacement back-end API and analytics platform (GraphQL, OpenAPI 3, NodeJS/Koa/Typescript, Redis, Redshift, Elasticsearch) which replaced original (custom ReST, Python/Django, Zappa/Lambda); owning site operations and HIPAA-related site security responsibilities (AWS, Cloudflare, Terragrunt/Terraform) including HIPAA-compliant release infrastructure (Gitlab/Gitlab CI, Elasticbeanstalk, AWS VPC); creating a virtual development environments for local development (Vagrant, Ubuntu, Ansible); and various engineering/IT-related SOP documents and budget decisions including title and compensation tiers.

RaiseMe helps students earn money for college in the form of micro-scholarships* Architected, designed and wrote a Netflix-style recommendation engine powering Raise.me’s college suggestion API in Go, Ruby and Python; deployment using AWS (EC2, RDS, ElasticBeanstalk), XPlenty and NewRelic.* Estimated, planned and resourced engineering to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) for the web site before certification deadlines* Designed and implemented a standardized virtual development environment for the engineering team using Vagrant integrated with existing Chef provisioning* Other development in Ruby on Rails, React/Redux, MongoDB and Bootstrap* Created and managed Architecture Change Control initiative, which uses a well-defined process to evaluate all engineering projects in context of impact on architecture and software structure; this significantly opened up engineering velocity and infrastructure integrity at the organization, unburdening the CTO from being a bottleneck* Directly managed two sprint teams of engineers on critical engineering projects

Annual reviews are terrible. Tinker is a lightweight peer-to-peer feedback app to provide individuals with more timely feedback on what their teammates find valuable and what can be improved. View the beta at: beta.tinkerapp.com.I served as CTO, building the beta website from scratch and handling everything from spinning up the servers to architecting the site and writing the bulk of the backend code and frontend UI. I recruited additional engineers to support the project and also did some business development to get lighthouse accounts on board to test the beta.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit responsible for Wikipedia, the 5th largest website in the world, and related properties available in over 280 languages worldwide.I was responsible for the largest single engineering division with the organization with over 30 direct reports when I left as well as tasked with the proposal for the re-organization of "Tech" (2/3 of the organization). Features Engineering consisted of 5 groups working on the VisualEditor and Parsoid, Fundraising, Editor Engagement, and Experimentation. During this time VisualEditor was released, Fundraising pulled in over $40M/year, releases quadrupled with notifications and commenting, as well as numerous onboarding experiments of first time users that was merged into the Analytics division under a new director.

Automattic is the commercial entity responsible for WordPress, the largest open-source software in the world (powered over a quarter of all websites on the internet) and specifically making WordPress.com which, in addition to being among the ten largest website on the internet in its own right, hosts blogs for sites such as the New York Times, Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, and CBS through the VIP program.I worked in first time user-experience by adding domain purchasing/mapping to signup and registration (doubling WordPress.com revenue at the time), as well as auto-activation on signup, wiriting helpers, and a guided tour. Also created an A-B testing framework, Twitter API, and OpenSearch on WordPress.com as well as the global tags page (source of ad traffic and GooglePageRank) as well as integrating it with the open-source WordPress through JetPack. Handled the Major League Baseball and Google Knol migration to WordPress. I also contributed numerous plugins to the WordPress software, some of which are actually popular, and have contributed a couple changes to WordPress open-source core software.

Lunch 2.0 started as a prank of sneaking in to lunch at tech companies in the Silicon Valley, and turned into a nationwide movement where companies like Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft, and Hitachi opened their doors to up to hundreds of tech workers for lunch with a side of tech.Besides being the co-founder I was the main organizer of events in Silicon Valley and San Francisco and maintainer of the website. As the only person to personally fund it ($5 for the domain name), I'm also the VC. ;-)

Tagged was a social discovery site that, while originally a social network for teenagers, peaked at the 3rd largest social network, boasting over 90 million registered users and 5.5 billion monthly pageviews when I left the company in 2009: Alexa Top 80, #3 social network in adverising market share (HitWise), #3 largest overall social network in the United States (Nielsen NetRatings), #3 and fastest growing social network in the United States in total daily users and time spent per user (comScore Media Metrix),I was their first and only software architect (a position that was open 18 months before I filled it), solved the site stability and scalability issues due to viral growth (5x growth in users, 70x in pages) through horizontal database scaling and real-time complete page and site rearchitecture while halving total server count. I wrote the open/closed API and architected everything around it, helped transition the development process from a waterfall (6 releases in 2006) to a daily release process and designed, architected, wrote and deployed MeetMe, the most popular dating application (precusor to Tinder) on the web, which solved the engagement problem plaguing the site (the reason user activity growth was 10x total user growth).Because of these and other changes, the company became the fastest growing social network (February 2009), experienced 14 straight months of profitability, and nearly eliminated engineering churn at the organization (100% a year to < 10% while more than doubling in size).

Plaxo started out in 2002 as the world's first connected address book and became the first company (for good or ill) to understand viral marketing, by which it quickly grew to 20 million users and over a billion contacts (currently over 50 million and 3.7 billion contacts). It also was instrumental in a much of the connected web through the use of both address book integration for invitations via an open API as well as being thought leaders in the area of social networking.I was promoted based on projects I took on my own initiative in addition to regular duties (below). This included rewriting the web client in remote scripting (now called "Ajax") which also inspired the founders of Meebo and Brightroll. In the fall of 2005, I created the eCards website which became their largest revenue-generated product (one million eCards and a quarter million dollars in sales in the first month) which was instrumental inclosing their Series C (eventually sold to Comcast for $175M in 2008). I also wrote a user survey engine and used it to guide data-driven decisions concerning revenue products.

I re-wrote the Plaxo web-client, Plaxo 2.0, which I completed in June 2004 while still a contractor. (The next update, Plaxo 3.0, took their team four years, a year and a half after I left the company.) Attached to product design, I was entirely responsible for the corporate website as well as launching revenue generating products. I was Plaxo's first web engineer which grew from one person (me) to seven people when I left. I also suggested the switch to using memcache for scalability and created the need for an internal API through a javascript wormhole which formed the basis of embedded open web APIs today.

MyCasa Network was a company that designed and maintained a platform for home device control (now called "Internet of Things") such as cameras, sensors, and switches using direct video, IP video, X10, 802.11, and RF. The platform was specializeable to be an IP camera, an add-on to cable boxes, and a cloud-configureable wireless network access point. At the time, its partners and clients included Logitech, Telecom Italia Mobile, and Nokia.I was hired to design and develop the Server3 Platform which was a web-services (SOAP, WSDL, XMLRPC) cloud-based rewrite of the architecture which allowed configuration management and notifications to happen between the home assistant and the cloud and from there to the clients. This superseded the unsuccessful work of an internal J2EE server team (Server1) and migrated/replaced the unstable contracted work proof-of-concept (Java/M7, aka Server2). In addition, I wrote the presentation layer, modularized for third-party use in multiple modes (HTML, WAP, VoiceXML, PocketPC, Palm) and wrote the billing/metering system as well as performed the security code review audit. I later oversaw two other front-end engineers who finished the layers and added the i18n/l10n support.

QIXO was the first internet travel comparison search engine (a search engine/aggregator of travel sites a la HipMunk), it was recognized in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Time, ABC News, Fodor's and USA Today, and would consistently win recognition for returning the lowest over price (PC Magazine).I originally wrote the XMLRPC based communication between the front end and the request processors, and later replaced the work of the CTO by rewriting the core technology (request processors) in SOAP-based horizontally scaled architecture to handle the robustness of load.On the front-end, I wrote the wireless presentation layer (AvantGo, PQA, WAP, VoiceXML) and a real-time addition to the web front end for search results using remote scripting (now called Ajax). I also wrote the booking client and was responsible for the server farm operations including the database, analytics, and load balancing. I directly supervised six engineers who maintained the front end, expanded the sites in the request processors, and built the payment system. The company was profitable when I left and didn't need to seek money beyond the original angel investment.

ZipAsia was a asian-focused content portal with offices in San Jose, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and Shanghai. It was folded in August 2000 after promised-funding from Softbank dried up due to the crash.I was originally a consultant and made a manager upon leaving graduate school in June of 2000. I was directly responsible for the US portal as well as the server farm and engineering for the site and all sister sites, with 10 people in the US reporting to me, consisting of programmers, writers and designers. I built a multi-lingual, multi-UI, extensible site around Microsoft technologies using XSL-T to customize and chrome it from XML content files (ASP, IIS, MS SQL).