1974

Born at USAF Kadena Air Base, Okinawa Japan to Thai mother and American father.

1979 - 1992

At the age of 5 Moved to Anaheim California, and grew up there.

1990

Got a PC clone and Beat King's Quest II, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.

1992-1997

Attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, graduating with a degree in Business/Economics emphasis in Accounting.

1998

Worked as a staff accountant for various companies.

1999 - 2002

Piaggio USA

Company Profile

Piaggio & C. SpA is an Italian motor vehicle manufacturer, which produces a range of two-wheeled motor vehicles and compact commercial vehicles under seven brands: Piaggio, Vespa, Gilera, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi, Derbi, and Scarabeo.

What I did for them

Created their warranty claim system as a windows app. Dealers submitted claims for work performed on scooters as part of their warranty obligations. I wrote a dotnet app that helped with the tracking of the claims, pulled in information from the Great Plains database, and allowed for the support of a workflow for staff who needed to approve the claims and send payment to dealers. The app was highly successful and was showcased when the President of Piaggio visited from Italy, as no other Piaggio subsidiary had a similar system.

2002 - 2004

RSM Equico

Company Profile

Global investment bank RSM EquiCo Capital Markets LLC, was one of the US's most successful merger and acquisition advisory firm. They eventually became the mergers and acquisitions subsidiary of H & R Block.

What I did for them

Worked with the in-house development staff to build new features for software package that managed the workflow of the entire company. A deal comprised taking a new prospective company and doing the groudwork and research necessary for that company to receive a valuation and be sold to a buyer. Deals were tracked through various stages by large number of staff in various departments.

2005

Discovered RubyonRails and quit .NET forever. A friend sold his startup to Microsoft and he wanted me to architect the next start up he was build after his acquisition obligations were finished. I started building an app stack for .NET using the best frameworks and tools available at the time. One afternoon I tried Rails and saw in an instant that it was better than anything else that existed. I knew I saw the future. Ruby at that time was unknown and my friend asked with incredulity that if I was switch to a dynamic scripting language then, "Why not Perl? They have Cpan." My story of switching from .NET to Rails was picked up as one of the first conversions soon to come.

2005-2007

Can't remember the name of the company

What I did for them

Wrote a Rails app that interfaced with a java backend and allowed for the purchasing on ringtones and other content for mobile phones. This mobile app was before the iphone so the app was very rudimentary and the actual transaction to place across SMS. Later developed a 3rd party ringtone app for selling Ringtones at Skype.

2007 - 2008

Vulcan Labs LLC / Gist

Company Profile

Vulcan Inc. is a privately held company founded by philanthropist, investor, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Established in 1986, Vulcan oversees Allen's diverse business activities and philanthropic efforts—from sports teams, which include the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers to conservation projects such as the Great Elephant Census and business ventures like the Seattle Cinerama. Vulcan Labs LLC was the experimental startup arm of Vulcan where experimental startup ideas where incubated.

Company Profile

Gist integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Gmail to aggregate emails and related material (links, attachments, news articles) by people and company. It also brings together feeds and information across social networks.

What I did for them

I worked on the core features of the app, which in the initial stage was the importing of emails from both IMAP and Gmail. A rudimentary parser was built to extract email addresses and urls from emails. Attachments were analyzed and recorded for their size, type, and title. Next the data was packaged for the UI which would present the user a dashboard that included a list of all attachments or things like a 3-D cloud / graph of the user's email social network.

I learned two important lessons that still inform my decisions to the current day. The first was that my job as a developer is to deliver business value and not as I had previously thought to build well-written software that was bug free. Instead with Gist we were trying to shotgun ideas fast enough and with just enough visibility of features to allow decison makers to decide whether to move further with the project. This meant that the app itself was either not functioning or riddled with bugs most of the time in the initial stage and that was fine with the stakeholders.

The second lesson occurred after Paul Allen gave his personal greenlight to go further which was then we had to shift focus and take the half built features and make them perform as expected without bugs. An effort towards that end was to have the developer who knew the most about writing unit tests (me), write the unit tests for the entire app at 100% code coverage. Though I achieved the end goal, I realized that a lot of the tests I constructed were meaningless shells of a test designed to fool the code coverage tool rather than providing what I believe to be the constructive value of unit tests. The reason this happened is because part of unit test is expressing the intent of the code that it's testing, this goal is lost when the developer writing the tests is not the one also writing the code. Although I lost faith in this activity I would further down the road repeat the same action of writing unit tests retroactively despite my protests.

2008 - 2009

City Winery

Company Profile

City Winery in New York City is a fully functioning winery with intimate concerts, food & wine classes, private events in a variety of configurations, and elevated dining.

What I did for them

I built an online store capable of handling both sales for their live events as well as shipped to customer merchandise such as wine and t-shirts. The store had a hard calendar deadline of the last week of the year because the winery opened on New Year's Eve with a Joan Osbourne concert. A Spree store was created and modified so that rather than just entering products a different type of product was also supported which was an event. Events held at City Winery of course occurred at particular times and so they needed to support cut off dates where after a particular time passed the site no longer listed the event and sales were closed. Additionally patrons were allowed to pick their seat in the 500 seat venue with different seats being provided at different price levels. A CMS was also fused into Spree to allow more content to be displayed about the artist and event. This store was extremely complex, and although the job itself was very stressful, I singlehandedly delivered the project to the satisfaction of City Winery after the company who hired me as a contractor broke both obligations to both City Winery and me.

2010

thoughtful

Company Profile

Thoughtful.co helps consumers quickly and easily give the right gift, at the right time. Available as a web and mobile application, the service recommends unique and thoughtful gifts and helps users manage important dates for the most important people in their lives.

What I did for them

I built features for their app that helped with the display of products.

2010

Recruit Military

Company Profile

RecruitMilitary is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bradley-Morris, Inc. (BMI), the largest military-focused recruiting company in the U.S. Together, BMI and RecruitMilitary offer employers access to more than 1,200,000 military job seekers via services that include contingency recruiting, military job fairs, a job board, employer branding, a military base publication and more.

What I did for them.

This was a pretty bog standard creation of their ecommerce store using Spree.

2010 - 2011

Cosas de Regalo

Company Profile

Cosas de Regalo is an ecommerce site in Barcelona, Spain they carry gifts for him and her, gifts for children and home decorations.

What I did for them

2011

Soletron

Company Profile

The Soletron platform was designed to facilitate the interaction between designer sneaker consumers and independent brands. Soletron has a structure similar to Etsy as it does not hold any inventory. Sellers sign up through the website to post their inventory online. Soletron brings a social element to retail as users can create profiles to follow brands or other members. They can also favorite products and share them with the online community. Soletron features a lifestyle blog meant to keep their visitors up to date on sneakerhead trends.

What I did for them

Soletron wanted to add faceted search to their Spree store. I custom implemented faceted search for them by replacing Spree's search functionality to instead use Solr. Solr did the heavy lifting of faceted search and so I created a user inteface to support the facets that Soletron specified (color, size, price, type of shoe, etc.)

2011 - 2014

End Point

Company Profile

End Point was founded in New York City in 1995 as a full-service software consultancy specializing in ecommerce, custom applications, enterprise security, and managed infrastructure.

What I did for them.

Harvard Law commissioned End Point to build an app called H2O which is a platform for creating, sharing and adapting open course materials. While this app was adapted for many other institutions initially it allowed Harvard Law Professors to upload PDF copies of US court cases that would be part of the curriculum for Harvard Law students. I worked on an annotations feature which allowed a professor to share annotations of a document to their class as well as allowing a student to add their own annotations. There was a versioning component to this that also allowed viewing annotations at different points in time.

2015 - Current

Moved to Thailand. After 10 years in Brazil I decided that it was a time for a long-term change and moved to Thailand at the suggestion of my parents. Being in Thailand allows me to take care of my parents as they get older, and it's also a fantastic place to live.

2015 - 2017

Bidsketch

Company Profile

Bidsketch proposal software lets you create, electronically sign, and track professional looking client proposals in 50% less time.

What I did for them

Worked on an unreleased app called Docsketch which is an electronic signature signing app similar to HelloSign or RightSignature. Using React I created the ability for a person to drag and drop signing elements onto an uploaded document in order to specify what needs to be executed for the signing. For example dragging a date from the sidebar onto the document would specify a date needed to be added by one or both parties. The drag and drop was provided React's DnD library and all of the advanced features both of it and HTML 5 drag and drop api were utilized so that the user interface was intuitive and worked as expected.