CTO / VP Engineering with more than 35 years experience in software development, mostly games. An inspirational leader with a cool head under pressure, experienced at building and growing high-functioning and flexible engineering teams, especially in distributed organizations. Well-suited to "greenfield" and exploratory projects where the technical direction needs to be determined.
A software architect and software engineer with technical experience all over the stack, including scalable backends, user interfaces, programming languages, and hardware drivers. Has architected, developed, and delivered big and small systems in a wide range of industries and technologies.
Founder or executive of multiple game companies. Experienced at leading mixed remote teams of designers, artists, and engineers.
Remotely lead a Slovenian team through the architecture and design of a new gaming platform intended to let people play games on TVs in bars. Unfortunately, COVID-19 meant that this enterprise didn't have enough runway to succeed, and I left it in October 2020.
Provided technology management and leadership in game development, focused on working with the Denali Games Hungary studio in Debrecen, Hungary. Supported the transition of an existing game to live ops and helped to schedule and coordinate release of additional content and features. In March, shifted concentration to engineering management, communications, software architecture, writing and reviewing code for a new game project based on popular IP. Unfortuately, Denali lost its funding in June due to COVID and was forced to close.
Was asked to help a Hungarian game development team that had suddenly lost all its leadership. Project was late and in disarray but delivery could not be slipped because it was coordinated with a movie release for a popular animated film. Spent 11 weeks on site providing technical, artistic and business management and helped the team deliver a high quality product on time (with some features and content removed to hit the date).
In charge of building the team and leading the architecture and implementation to create a new type of cryptocurrency. Using the Tendermint consensus engine, we designed, built, and deployed a blockchain-based cryptocurrency with a built-in economic model designed to keep the currency "buoyant".
Also managed the design, development and deployment of a secure wallet app using JavaScript and React Native on iOS and Android, as well as a blockchain explorer app.
Helped to lead software design and implementation of a variety of client-facing and internal software services at AchievementNetwork.org to replace and update old, brittle systems. Responsible for devops, building and deploying a scalable backend to using Go to implement an API using microservices on AWS; also worked with JavaScript (Angular 1) to build a new single-page frontend application.
Responsible for wrangling the construction of tidepool.org, an open source stack of technology for helping patients with management of Type 1 diabetes, and the recording and display of data from wearable medical devices. Mostly working in Go and Javascript with engineers distributed around the globe.
Led the engineering team for a large Facebook game project with several managerial and direct reports, for an engineering team size of 17. Responsible for engineering architecture of the product and its tool chain. Key member of studio management, working with other executives to operate the studio and report to senior team within Playdom and Disney Interactive. Frequently met with executives across Playdom and Disney Interactive to give them a technical perspective from a studio point of view.
Acted as the leading company expert on use and deployment of C# and Unity3D and the transition away from Flash, as well as being involved in many decisions regarding central web-scale technologies.
Led the client software engineering team to define and build advanced C++ application software for our 3D virtual world. Led the Snowstorm team, a project designed to open up the software development process and bring open source contributions into the live codebase.
Promoted twice: originally started as a senior software engineer, promoted to engineering manager and then to director.
Major in Physics, Minor in Electrical Engineering.
Expert programmer with experience at all levels of the stack, from shaders to large scale backends. Particularly good at producing high-quality documented and maintainable code; believes clear is better than clever and understands how to make the tradeoffs necessary to go to production with real products. Talented at software architecture for complex, large scale systems.
Most recent work has been in C#, Python, Go, and JavaScript, but has production experience in C++ and Java.
Server-side work mostly in AWS with emphasis on microservices and horizontal scalability. Recent web work in Angular and React, with mobile development using Unity (C#) and React Native (JavaScript).
Comfortable in 3D and 2D graphics programming using OpenGL and shaders.
Experienced and empathetic engineering manager; has managed teams up to 40 engineers. Frequently called "the best manager I've ever had".
Game design has been a subspecialty for my entire career in the game industry, and I always try to provide input to design. Especially in games, the technology must inform and enable the design for both visuals and gameplay. Production, tooling, art, tech and design need to work closely in the early stages in order to maximize the quality of the resulting game.
In the early 90s, I became a user interaction designer and engineer at Lotus Development. I have had an interest ever since in building interfaces based around developing a deep understanding of the needs of the customer. I'm a big fan of user research and doing the design and engineering work required to create truly great products.
I hired my first offsite employee in 1997. I have run fully distributed engineering teams since 2007. I've seen what works and what fails, and I have learned how to do it and how to be effective -- even in the startup phase, and across disparate time zones. COVID-19 didn't change my work style at all.
I'm a coder, but I've always been interested in finding ways to make the power of programming accessible to people without actually making them deal with textual syntax. Much of my work history has been finding ways to make complex systems accessible to more people. Ask me about Lotus Notebook, MindRover, and Cosmic Blobs.
It may seem an odd combination with Visual Programming, but the design and implementation of programming languages has been an area of my work for a long time. Both come from the desire to bring the tools closer to the problem. Across my career, I've written a number of parsers and code generators for a variety of both simple and complex languages.