Create products on the cutting edge of their respective industries, with a team that values vision, integrity, education, and community.
Accomplished technology leader with over fourteen years of technical leadership experience; technical skills kept current.
I come from a technical research background in a wide variety of fields, including video library systems, biomedical informatics, criminal records, and natural language processing. More recently, I've been taking on large-scale consumer-facing products with an interesting mix of math and visualization.
I prefer immediate results through ruthless collaboration. Over time, I've adopted these approaches, which are proving to be very effective when applied while listening to the team:
Inceptions, short iterations, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Continuous Integration (CI), pair programming, full-stack development, Fibonacci point-based estimation, empirical iteration planning and release prediction, product owner embedded with developers, frequent releases, and retrospectives.
The result has been higher productivity, quality, velocity, and morale, with clear, positive results for our business.
I joined TrueCar when it was a startup, as the 4th employee, when we were borrowing desks from our incubator, Zag. As the lead technologist, I built TrueCar.com from the ground up, assembling a team of senior engineers, collaborating on all aspects of growing our business, hiring executives in other disciplines (Analytics, Media Relations, Product, etc), and coding along with fellow software engineers.
Now that TrueCar is a larger organization, my focus is on products in their early, experimental stages, with a small, skunkworks team in San Francisco. Once products reach sufficient feature maturity (usually a matter of weeks), we make them robust, secure, and scalable, to either maintain ourselves or hand off to a team of our peers at HQ.
We built ClearBook.com from scratch to 1.0 in 9 weeks, and we've got a full roadmap of products to knock out in the coming year. Similar to my experience with TrueCar.com, I hired the team and built the product with them.
Yahoo Autos (in part): As of January, 2012, TrueCar took over the Yahoo Autos website.
For our part, we re-built our used car pricing solution (ClearBook), and other widgets, to meet the performance,
scalability, and security standards required at that level, and introduced new features in the process.
Total time: 6 weeks.
(Official launch: January 1, 2011)
(View Yahoo Autos in Portfolio)
ClearBook.com: Used car pricing information and analysis, more comprehensive and accurate than
any other source. Shows your used car's list, sales, and trade-in prices in relation to market transactions
for competing used cars. (Official 2.0 Beta production launch: July, 2011)
We have re-architected this project to add layers for RESTful APIs, highly scalable widgets, and data feeds.
(Official releases from late 2011 into 2012.)
(View ClearBook.com in Portfolio)
TrueCar.com: New car pricing information and analysis, more comprehensive and accurate than any
other source. Integrated with an up-front pricing platform, transforming how new cars are sold.
(Official 1.0 Beta production launch: January, 2009)
(View TrueCar.com in Portfolio)
Private Cloud: I've worked closely with our Production Engineering team to help automate the deployment, updating, and administration of applications in our private cloud, which is modeled roughly after Google's and TicketMaster's. With high consumer traffic and high-profile partners, we satisfied strict SLAs and exceeded performance, security, and availability requirements.
ClearBook Mobile: During innovation time, some of us, including myself, are writing mobile apps to bring ClearBook used car pricing to mobile users. These are native clients for Android, IOS (iPhone and iPad), and Windows Phone. As of this writing, the Android client is the most mature, with almost the full functionality of the ClearBook flagship widget. We haven't released them yet, and most of our colleagues don't even know about the project. Ssh.
- Tech stacks include: Ruby on Rails, Ruby, Java, JRuby, Padrino, Sinatra, Django, Python, ObjectiveC, C#, HTML5/JS, and more.
- For TDD, we use rspec2, rr, jasmine, cucumber, capybara, selenium, factory_girl, nokogiri, webrat, and more.
- Production Infrastructure is mainly on our private cloud. Early prototypes are hosted on Heroku and/or AWS. Server OSes include Scientific Linux (RHEL-based), Ubuntu, CentOs, and RHEL, hosted on ProxMox and VMWare. Database back-ends include MySql, MS SQL Server, Postgres, and SAS. For configuration management, we use puppet, chef, and capistrano, among other tools. Architecture is ephemeral, HA goodness.
- Process: Agile, XP, Scrum, TDD, CI, Fibonacci point-based estimation, pair programming, and automated iteration/release planning.
- I also host Hack Night at TrueCar, an event for SF Ruby I run every other Wednesday night in downtown San Francisco.
Engineering and leadership combined: Created the vision, built the teams, architected & implemented solutions and led the teams, hands-on, in the full production life-cycle of a new product portfolio:
mDesking: A large-scale, web-based application for real-time, financial analysis and
optimization at the point of sale in the automotive industry.
(Official production launch: March, 2008)
(View mDesking in Portfolio)
mGauge: Distributed, online statistical analysis application to draw correlations between behaviors and outcomes throughout the auto sales process. (Official production launch: December, 2007)
Technologies used: C#, JavaScript, ASP.NET 3.x, MS SQL Server, Firebird, SOAP, XML, Visual Studio, Delphi, OnTime, TestComplete
2007-2008: concurrent, full-time university student: earned BS/CS degree and completed 5 MS/CS classes. GPA: 3.963
Joined this startup mid-flight. Lead the research, development, and QA for 911 Computer Aided Dispatch systems. Architected and implemented robust, distributed, mission-critical systems for public safety. Technologies used: Delphi, XML, Interbase, MS SQL Server 2000
PATENT No: US 6,915,308 B1
- Researched and developed a novel, cross-language, visual research and analysis system for exploring high-dimensional document space using networks of natural language processing modules.
- Researched and produced a web application to micro-summarize text for pagers and mobile phones.
- Researched and built visualization systems for high-dimensional data.
Technologies used: Java, C++, Delphi, Interbase, XML, DCOM, CORBA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Informedia Project
- Researched digital video library systems for real-time search of large-scale video data as a member of a team consisting mainly of cutting-edge scientists with PhDs in their respective fields.
- Features included: Speech recognition, automatic video segmentation, automatic transcript synchronization, video optical character recognition (OCR), face recognition, and more. My involvement was mainly in integration and distributed systems, along with a few side projects in visualization and combined-media searches.
Technologies: C, C++, Java, Delphi, Visual Basic, Perl, Informix, Interbase, DCOM, CORBA
- 1997-2000 Causal Modeling for the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biomedical Informatics
- 1996-1998 Human Recognition and Morphing in Digital Images for a private research company
- 1994-1995 Complete E-Commerce System for a Medical Clinic
- ...
Conducted a variety of seminars, panels, and classes. Topics include Software Engineering Methodologies, Leadership, numerous technical subjects, and Japanese language and culture.
- Bachelors of Science in Computer Science (CS), plus 5 Masters CS classes
- Institutional Cumulative GPA: 3.963
- Left prior to graduation for a DARPA project (see above)
- Performing member of Togen Daiko (a non-profit, Taiko / kumi-daiko ensemble)
- Occasional host of Obscure Foreign Film Night (combining foreign film with respective culture and cuisine) and Comedy Nights
- Amateur endurance athlete, competing mainly in charity triathlons and centuries.
- Reading (engineering, business, politics, education, sci-fi, documentaries, biographies, religion)
- Japanese Language and Cultural Studies