My Portfolio

Below is a small selection of projects I have worked on recently. I've included projects from my academic coursework and work projects. If you have any questions about me or my work please feel free to contact me.

[email protected]

CBSi: Games Division Websites

I am currently the director of engineering for the Games division of CBS Interactive.

These are highly trafficked websites with millions of visitors. I manage all work and have made major technical contributions to the following CBS Interactive properties:

I am the director of Engineering for the CBSi Games group. I manage a team of 14 engineers who are responsible for all new development and maintenance for the following 4 sites.

Example Projects

  • Complete rewrite of subscription billing system
  • Redesign/Rebuild of Giantbomb and Comicvine Wiki
  • Complete redesign of Giant Bomb
  • On-prem to cloud GCP migration

Languages PHP, JavaScript, CSS
Framework Symfony
Database MySQL
Caching Memcached, Redis, Varnish
Web Server NGINX
Hosting Google Cloud Platform (GKE)

CBSi: Cloud Migration

My team fully transitioned from an on prem webserver based hosting model to a completely cloud native GCP based platform.

We handled the vast majority of the work within our team and were able to migrate all sites with no downtime.

Tech

  • Google Kubernetes Engine
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Docker
  • Helm
  • Memorystore

CBSi: Chat System

I led the project and did the majority of the programming for the complete rewrite of our live user chat system.

The old system was an AWS, Redis, and Socket IO based chat system that was expensive and fragile.

The updated system running on Firebase cost a tiny fraction of the old system and has been rock solid in terms of reliability and scalability.

See it in action here: https://www.giantbomb.com/infinite/

Tech

Platform Google Firebase
Front End Backbone, Underscore
Database Firebase Realtime Database
Authentication/Authorization JWT tied with CBSi auth system and Firebase Database Rules
  • 4 different user roles with different functionality (Staff, mods, users, VIPs)
  • Multiple Chat rooms for different users
  • Emotes
  • Customizable Message cooldown timers by user or room
  • Mentions & Replies
  • User Reporting and moderation queues
  • Full user moderation suite (banning, silencing, purging messages, etc.)
  • Banned phrases and words for auto moderation
  • Multiple layout options and preferences
  • "Ask a question" for asking direct questions to staff/hosts
  • Custom Polls with realtime voting
  • Full chat logs for later moderation
  • Various page manipulation features for realtime messaging to all users
  • Etc.

CBSi: Wiki Rewrite

I led the project and did a large portion of the programming for the complete rewrite of our wiki system on Giant Bomb and Comic Vine. These wikis are massive Video Game and Comic Book wikis that store structured relational data on virtually every game or comic book ever released.

The updated system uses a set of REST web services to surface all browsing, editing, and moderation of wiki data. A Backbone based front end application interfaces with those web services to expose editing and moderation of the wiki to end users.

See it in action here:

Public API:

Tech

Platform PHP/Symfony
Front End Backbone, Underscore
Back End PHP Symfony REST web services
Database mySQL

Master's Thesis: Active Analytics

Adapting Web Pages Automatically Based on Analytics Data

As part of my Master of Science: Software Engineering degree I completed a fully functional web application and the associated research paper. I've included a link to my complete thesis paper below.

Here’s the gist of it: I am extracting analytics data gathered by Google Analytics on the UNF website. I am summarizing this data and saving it in a database. I then expose this data via web services to a client side JavaScript framework where I use it to adapt the UI of the website. This could be in the form of suggested links, emphasizing more popular links on a page with CSS styling, or more intelligent search suggestions on the site search. See the video below for a demonstration of some of these features.

Platform Google Cloud Platform
Web Application Google App Engine Python Runtime Environment
Database Google NDB Datastore
Client Side JavaScript/jQuery