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2017 - Present: Chinese American International School
Director of Technology
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An amazing school with an amazing mission, now also featuring amazing technical leadership.
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2016 - 2018: Sophichkin Studios
Author and Founder
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Produced a series of children's stories aimed at helping children and adults remember
to appreciate the simple adventures and miracles that occur in our lives each day.
- Authored a series of children's stories about a little girl and her father.
- Handled all layouts, editing, eBook compliations, publishing, publicity and social media efforts
- Located, hired and managed freelance illustration work
- Managed all self publishing through Amazon distribution channels.
- Daniel Fettinger on Amazon
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2010 - 2015: TheFind.com
Director - Front
End Platform, API and Android Engineering
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TheFind was acquired by Facebook in 2015.
TheFind crawled the web and with its patented search technology, helping shoppers
discover everything that online shopping has to offer. Over 320 million products from
more than 500,000 stores and online merchants were universally accessible.
As the leader of the front
end platform team, I was responsible for all web engineering timelines, scoping,
inter-departmental communications, hirings, personnel evaluations and release deliveries.
I also tried to code from time to time, although my engineers discouraged this practice (that was a joke).
- Worked with a geographically disparate team (India, Russia, San Francisco and Mountain View, CA)
- Worked with Product Management to institute the company's first genuine SDLC process
- Responsible for instating best practice source control protocols
- Attained predictable software release dates
- Oversaw, from a web stack perspective, the opening of the company's second data center, on time and on budget
- Responsible for all cross departmental tasking and scheduling -- from mobile to marketing to web product to QA to release
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2008 - 2010: Salzinger & Company
Director of Technology
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Salzinger & Company is a strategy and operations consulting firm in the media, technology and communications arena.
Salzinger, LLC brought the Noozler.com technology and team into their fold in 2008 with eyes on digital marketing opportunities
in the health and wellness industry. Products developed since include a business-to-consumer front end for
OptumHealth Allies (A United Health Group Company),
a health and wellness storefront, an online quiz management and delivery API and a customer survey engine.
As their Director of Technology, my duties include product design, technical and systems planning, technical client
liaison and hands-on software implementation with an emphasis on SEO and front-end technologies.
Highlights
- Worked with geographically disparate team to design, develop and deploy four distinct application platforms in rapid fashion
- Responsible for all serving platform and hosting decisions and contracts
- Instituted company's first SDLC process, based on Agile methodologies
- Technologies included Ruby on Rails, Apache, Gentoo Linux and MySQL
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2008: Noozler
President / Co-Founder
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Noozler is a blog aggregation engine focused on the celebrity gossip space.
As a co-founder, my responsibilities ranged from product and technical design
to implementation, system maintenance and content management.
The technology and team behind the noozler.com website was acquired by
Salzinger LLC (see above) and became core to many of their product offerings.
Highlights
- Anchored a team of three in the design and development of data aggregation bot and associated data mapping/processing systems
- Responsible for all vendor decisions and contracts (design, hosting, writers)
- Hand picked team of engineers, writers and designers to rapidly develop the application. Time to market from inception was under one quarter
- Technologies included Nginx, Ruby on Rails, Gentoo Linux and PostgreSQL
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2007: FanIQ.com
Director of Technology
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FanIQ is a leading sports community site with millions of users.
As their first technical manager, reporting directly to the CEO,
I quickly doubled their capacity and engineering resources. Many of their
earliest user acquisition features were directly in my purview.
Highlights
- I was their first full time employee (just following series A funding), and was responsible for building their engineering team from one contractor to three dedicated engineers in under one quarter
- Oversaw development of their Sports Trivia application, which quickly became one of the most popular features on the site
- Implemented their first ever redundant system, more than doubling their capacity in my first months
- Instituted FanIQ's first ever SDLC process and reporting systems
- Developed, with the CEO, their first six and twelve month product roadmaps
- Oversaw performance tuning of the legacy applications which led to over a 50% decrease in average page load time in less than a month
- Technologies included Apache, PHP, Linux and MySQL
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2001-2007: StubHub
Senior Manager - Software Development
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StubHub is the world's largest ticket marketplace, enabling users to
buy and sell tickets to tens of thousands of live entertainment events.
I was hired as their third engineer and 12th employee. During my tenure,
the company grew from a tiny start-up, to an enterprise of over 400, eventually
being acquired by eBay.
Over the course of my nearly six years there, I was involved in every major application development project. At the time of acquisition, I managed the software development department, leading a team of 17 engineers and managers responsible for all application work on the StubHub.com website.
Highlights
- Was instrumental in designing, implementing and evangelizing both the first waterfall based development process and eventual migration to an agile process based on Extreme Programming
- Championed strong, productive relationships with engineering's business partners at every step of the company's growth. The strong relationships fostered with product development, quality assurance, project management, technical operations and marketing were part and parcel to the productivity focused culture of engineering as a service organization.
- Was responsible for all hiring and organization decisions in the Application Development department
- Directly responsible for all performance evaluations, performance plans and compensation negotiations for the applications team
- Mentored many younger developers from "fresh out of school" to legitimate senior level engineers by fostering a positive environment for growth and championing a "promote from within" culture
- Led, designed, implemented or managed every major application development endeavor at StubHub from September 2001 - April 2007
- Worked collaboratively with the executive and product teams to develop each of StubHub's quarterly product roadmaps
- Designed and implemented StubHub's first ever content management suite using a single point of entry to an XSL/ColdFusion/XML/Oracle system allowing non-technical staff to manage site promotions, system generated emails, site map and SEO content
- Designed and implemented site search utilizing a custom XSL front end and a small cluster of Google Search Appliances
- With product management, designed and implemented a complete SEO overhaul of the StubHub site which resulted in huge organic search gains in the highly competitive ticket industry
- Technical management and implementation for partner sites including MSN, USA Today, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Rolling Stone, New York Jets, Green Bay Packers, Dallas Stars, Los Angeles Clippers, Indiana Pacers, Texas Rangers, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, Seattle Mariners, FOX Sports, The Sporting News and AOL.
- Designed and implemented an XML integration for cross-site inventory management with eBay.com based on eBay's first beta API
- Worked on a team of three employees to transition the StubHub.com from a managed Solaris, iPlanet, ColdFusion 5, Oracle 8 system to a custom, colocated Red Hat Linux, Apache, ColdFusion MX, Oracle 9i RAC environment
- Managed all application conversions from legacy ColdFusion to a flow control based Java system
- Technologies included Apache, ColdFusion, Java, Linux, Oracle, Solaris, XSL
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1999-2001: zeroDEF Design Associates
Director / Co-Founder
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Founded a collective of freelance development contractors.
Clients included BET.com (Black Entertainment Television), UC Berkeley Extension, Xircom, Detroit New Media Association and Dragonfly Mobile, Inc.
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1997-1999: sigma6 Interactive Media (A Division of Appnet)
Web Operations / Production Manager
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Served as project development coordinator, lead developer and primary technical
client liaison for boutique web shop. In two years I oversaw the
development of tens of successful web rollouts varying from corporate identity
and e-commerce storefronts to operational intranets.
Project clients included General Motors, Plymouth, Worlddealer.net, Delphi Automotive, Harmony House and STS Systems.
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1994-1997: Control Room Technologies
Vice President / Co-Founder
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Founded Internet software development company. CRT was covered in Web Week and
Interactive Week for its work with then cutting edge remotely manageable web
sites and real-time handheld data. CRT was also heralded for being among the
very first to embrace streaming audio technology and database driven content management systems.
Clients included One-on-One Sports Radio Network, Nokia Sugar Bowl and Beatbox.com.
