Hi there 👋 I’m an experienced software engineer with a focus on iOS apps. I’ve shipped over 30 to the App Store, including 9 IoT products. A few of those have even gone on to be part of very large acquisitions by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
I help businesses by focusing on empathy and respect for the humans that use technology and delivering usable interfaces built with clean, tested code on a solid foundation of architecture, infrastructure, and automation. I’m willing to be stubborn in the pursuit of excellence, and I work hard to cultivate my teams’ ability to strategically and sustainably deliver with a high bar for quality.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Owlet
Owlet sells the Dream Sock for monitoring a baby’s heart rate, pulse oximetry, and motion, and the Cam 2 for monitoring temperature, humidity, sound, motion, and crying. Owlet developed Band, the world’s first passive external pregnancy monitor, but has not yet brought it to market.
I maintained and improved Owlet’s three apps for iOS supporting 300K DAU, and my contributions and leadership were critical to the 2022 launches of Dream Sock and Cam 2 and to efforts to bring Band to market.
Mondo Robot
Mondo Robot contracted me in 2019 to rescue and improve a pair of iOS apps for their client, a travel nurse staffing agency. The apps had fallen into disrepair since their original implementation by another top mobile agency.
My experience in an agency/client relationship setting and my expertise working with legacy code helped secure the client’s confidence in Mondo Robot for the next phase of work.
My contract ended in success, with the apps restored to good shape in the App store for weathering the next phase of development: a brand redesign, including a new website and a rewrite of the apps in React Native, which allowed Mondo Robot’s in-house web development expertise to shine.
Ibotta
As of late 2022, Ibotta has helped over 40MM shoppers earn over $1.2BB in cash back rewards (don’t call them coupons) since 2012.
Ibotta hired me to provide mature leadership and direction to rehabilitate the mixed-Swift/Objective-C legacy codebase with just 2% test coverage that was proving problematic for small, young team struggling with velocity and releasing frequently and with stability.
Major Input
Major Input for iPad ripped a transcript from the HLS live stream captions of a WWDC conference session and provided a novel UI for swiftly and immersively reading it in sync with critical context from the presentation’s video.
It’s a text scrubber for video, replacing the passive experience of watching a video with an active, engaging reading experience taking as little as half the time.
Apple “sherlocked” this project in 2019, when they began incorporating most of these ideas into the web UI for WWDC 2019 and then into the Apple Developer app released that November.
Mr. Cooper Mortgage
Nationstar Mortgage rebranded as Mr. Cooper in 2017.
In 2014, Nationstar’s technology arm, Solutionstar, acquired Title365 and data aggregator Real Estate Digital, or RED, to build a competitor in the digital real estate sector with companies like Redfin and Zillow. In 2015, Solutionstar rebranded as Xome to launch a platform for all-digital real estate transactions.
In 2016, Nationstar was exploring an opportunity to build a digital experience for homeowners, including their own mortgagees, that could provide enough user value to build a driver for business conversion opportunities. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to work on a greenfield project with a fully-empowered team of great people.
To start, the app would provide homeowners with a data report on their property and mortgage, its market position and outlook, and comparisons to other properties. Later, focus shifted towards an Instagram-style social network for homes, where a homeowner could celebrate their home and style. Management purchased the three-letter domain name Den.com and leveraged Xome’s sponsorship of the L.A. Raiders.
After the team’s false start with React Native, I set to work building a native iOS app. After the direction shift, I built and led a small iOS team to completion of a functional beta version. Financial difficulties led Nationstar to pull the plug on the Den project and consider selling Xome. More recently, Nationstar divested Xome in a pair of sales to focus on its core business.
eero
In 2016, eero changed the consumer home Wi-Fi market by wrapping enterprise-grade mesh networking Wi-Fi router technology in Apple’s human-centric UI/UX approach and industrial design aesthetic.
I collaborated with eero’s small team near the end of a race to the launch deadline. Over a third of the UI was still missing, and there was a significant new UI design revision to be applied to everything and seemingly not enough time to update every screen one by one.
I made time by inferring the design language and implementing a UI framework of design system atoms and molecules composed up into generalized screen-level support for a low-boilerplate, declarative style of screen definition, making it a breeze to finish the UI. Extracting part of the framework’s implementation from the existing screens and migrating them the rest of the way deflated a great deal of duplicated code, resolved a number of bugs, and gave the UI a new consistency throughout the app.
Amazon acquired eero for $97MM in 2019.
Video Tour • Engadget • Brian Krebs on Security • Gizmodo • CNet • Consumer Reports
Beam
After developing some early-days HomeKit expertise, before Apple released its HomeKit app with iOS 10, we saw a large gap in the market for a beautiful, functional, universal HomeKit app. We built Beam to scratch that itch and others.
Apple took notice and invited us to their headquarters for a chat about our design and experiences building Beam with HomeKit. Within a year, they “sherlocked” us with the 2016 release of the Home app, which included a few obvious design similarities.
Beam was “sherlocked” and has been discontinued.
Video Tour • Video Review • Case Study • Ad Spot
Honeywell
Lyric app is now Honeywell Home by Resideo, with a new look and feel.
Collaborated with Honeywell on their universal iPhone/iPad app to launch their first smart thermostat, Lyric, out of Beta. Inherited the beta codebase, built out dynamic geofencing support, and built and improved new and existing flows around device connectivity and installation.
This was the second project in the world to apply VIPER architecture, which enabled us to confidently make changes to the app’s highly complex flows with a previously-unattainable efficiency.
Catch a glimpse of my custom map UI work in this user guide video at 0:54 and again at 2:37, including the geofence control, the zoom animation response for precision, and the map scale indicator that Apple didn’t provide at the time.
Video Tour • The Verge
Lynda.com
Lynda.com is now LinkedIn Learning. In 2015, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com for $1.5BB, and in 2016, Microsoft acquired Linkedin for over $26BB.
Starting from scratch, relaunched Lynda.com’s iPhone app as a universal iPhone/iPad app, providing millions of users with a convenient new way to access the video learning platform for design, programming, and more.
Worked with HLS for adaptive bitrates, captioning in multiple languages, AirPlay, and a custom stream encryption system to support offline mode before Apple introduced Fairplay Streaming in 2016. Created a custom HLS video player using AVFoundation. Authentication had some interesting complexities due to Lynda.com’s sales of bulk licenses to businesses, universities, schools, and libraries.
Philips Respironics
Laid the foundation for Philips’ DreamMapper iPhone app that helps CPAP machine owners with sleep apnea.
Wrote a parser family to serialize/deserialize commands/responses to/from Philips’ proprietary binary protocols, handling lesser and greater differences in each CPAP machine’s protocol, across the line.
Developed against CPAP machines with Apple MFi support using the ExternalAccessary framework. The framework nicely abstracts transport, leaving little work left to transition to Bluetooth from the serial connection over the old 30-pin connector that was available for my development.
The app’s UI/UX design also wasn’t quite ready for me, but the DreamMapper app now provides data to help coach folks with sleep apnea to use the CPAP machine correctly and provide usage statistics for regulatory and insurance accountability.
QBOT
Built a prototype app for iPad providing a modern user interface and control system for the QBOT robotic quilting controller. The quilter either selected a predefined pattern or manually added waypoints by moving QBOT over the fabric. After scaling the pattern and positioning QBOT, the quilter launched sewing. Development was put on hold after I discovered insurmountable issues with a third-party’s design of new QBOT control hardware. Once those issues were resolved, only an Android app was released.
NBA Fit
For the NBA, built an iOS app providing fans with access to players in a fitness social network experience, by adapting the now-discontinued Under Armour Record app. Powered by UnderArmour’s platform, the app was designed to teach, motivate, and challenge basketball fans to be active and healthy.
The app is no longer available in either app store.
Softcard
Softcard was acquired by Google, rolled into Google Wallet, and discontinued.
Originally named Isis (with unfortunate timing), the Softcard iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone apps were the culmination of the digital wallet collaboration of the big three mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
The iPhone app worked with an external hardware case that provided a secure element. Development on Windows Phone halted first. We launched the iPhone app nationwide in the U.S. Then, our iPhone development halted. For one thing, the hardware case was bulky yet drained the phone’s battery even faster than normal.
With a knowledge of Java and no prior Android experience, I took the opportunity to join our Android team for over half a year before that effort was finally halted.
Viverae
Built the foundation for initial launch of Viverae’s iPhone app. The Viverae platform gamified health and wellness for employees of platform member companies to achieve group healthcare savings.
In 2018, Viverae acquired SimplyWell, rebranded as SimplyWell, and was soon acquired by Virgin Pulse.
Viverae app is discontinued.
Thermo Fisher Scientific
The Flourescence Spectraviewer iPhone app, from Invitrogen, graphs and presents the technical specs of molecular probes—flourescent proteins and dyes used biotech applications.
The app had been released to the App Store, but was completely broken. I ended up rewriting nearly the entire app. I wrangled and refactored the duplication out of a 10K-line drawRect: implementation of the graph view. I rebuilt the graph-builder, added a draw-to-PDF implementation, and built the sharing feature.
WTWH Media
For Design World, I built a dedicated RSS+Atom reader, along with custom, branded UI for a universal iPhone/iPad app, for 50-100 feeds of articles from the WTWH family of trade magazines.
Content was inconsistent between feeds, mostly encoded HTML containing content from a CMS within which the content was inconsistently character-encoded, including incorrectly encoded, and more than once in some cases. Parsed an RSS/Atom feed, then decoded embedded HTML and parsed to extract text and image and movie URLs, scrubbed dirty text, stored contents in Core Data to support offline reading, and presented native grid UI for navigating to an article and injected content into an HTML template for reading the article.
The app is discontinued.
Raley’s
Raley’s is a family of west-coast grocery stores. This simple iPhone app presented recipes from a bundled database in list/detail format. It was a lo-fi clone of Epicurious, which was, itself, simpler at the time.
This app is discontinued.
PeopleFinders
This pair of iPhone apps, “Are They Really Single?” and “Stud or Dud”, provided a search interface into PeopleFinders’ public records database. You can opt out of Peoplefinders and many other “data brokers”.
Both apps have been discontinued.
App Store® and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc.
Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC.