Black Book Singles
Black Book Singles is a free online dating service. Originally launched in 2007, the site was built using CakePHP and MySQL. The site has undergone several redesigns over the years, with its most recent iteration running on Ruby 1.9.2 with a Rails 3.1, PostgreSQL 9.0, and SphinxSearch 2.0 backend. In addition to being on the web, a native Android dating app is available as well.
Food on the Table
In February 2010, Food on the Table brought me on board to assist with their Facebook Connect integration and front end development efforts. After becoming familiar with the backend Rails code, I was made a full-time employee to continue to develop the product using Erik Reis‘ “Lean Startup” approach. Food on the Table has become one of the more noteworthy companies taking advantage of lean startup methodology, and even had the honor of being recognized in Reis’ publication, The Lean Startup.
Challenge Online Games
I moved halfway across the country to join Challenge Games in 2008. As I was one of the early adopters of the Facebook Platform, my role was to integrate existing and upcoming games with Facebook Connect, while taking advantage of viral sharing opportunities such as posting in-game events to users’ walls.
Comprising 50% of the core Facebook integration team, I hooked five web-based games — Duels, MechDuels, WarStorm, PlanetStorm, and Baseball Boss — into Facebook. Additionally, I participated in the development effort of several experimental games running within Facebook itself, including Ponzi, Inc., which was the last game created by the company prior to being acquired by Facebook gaming giant Zynga.
QVC
QVC was my first full-time post-graduate job as a developer. Starting in 2004, I spent my first 1.5 years supporting the existing customer service system built on ASP and VB COM+ while designing and developing an enterprise-level replacement in Java/J2EE. Some of my work also involved generating reporting interfaces for use with the customer service oriented data warehouse running on Oracle.
I eventually progressed onto the public side of things, developing for and supporting QVC.com (US), QVC.co.uk (UK), and QVC.de (Germany). Here I had the opportunity to work on projects that had to be coordinated internationally, working some odd hours to coincide with foreign timezones, while managing releases of changes that affected site availability and accessibility.