I'm a computer programmer, turned software engineering manager at Disney where my team builds the streaming playback technology under the hood in Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, among other Disney brands.
I live in Saratoga Springs, NY, but have also lived and worked in Los Angeles, Boston and New York.
Here are some highlights of what I've written. Or, check out the full list of essays to get it all. I plan to write a lot more in the near future.
Luck plays a role in our successes and failures. But we can make our own luck if we take deliberate action to make ourselves a target for it.
I set out to push the limits of movement in the mountains and see what I could learn about hiking and climbing long distances through rugged terrain and winter weather.
I tend to downplay new things in software which people are generally excited about. Perhaps unfairly. In my view new technology had a more significant impact on the world back when I was coming of age. But maybe that's just a side effect of getting older?
More on my essays page.
My team builds the streaming playback technology under the hood in Disney+, Hulu , and ESPN among other Disney brands.
I joined Bamtech Media as a Senior Engineer in 2018 just before it was acquired by Disney to create Disney+. Through a number of mergers and corporate reorganizations I now lead a software engineering team inside Disney Entertainment Technology which is behind all of the streaming technology at Disney.
I've been fortunate enough in that time to grow from a senior engineer, who designed and built the Disney+ HTML5 video streaming engine, to an engineering manager responsible for more people and technology than I had ever imagined. It's been a fun ride and given me a wealth of valuable experiences, good and bad, to learn from.
We had the crazy idea of building a video streaming platform. We were naive when we started, but it didn't take long to learn the fundamentals of the video streaming industry. Although the startup fizzled out, the foundation for where I am now, today, was built during this compact and intense time period.
"Hero for hire" as we liked to say, MadGlory was a small software development and design agency primarily focused in the video gaming industry, but we took on plenty of other interesting projects as well. I was involved with an automated parking meter system, video streaming, Xbox applications, and an in-app rewards system, to name a few.
I teamed up with a surgeon to create interactive multimedia text books for medical students. Although the opportunity was extremely exciting, and the technology was ahead of its time, the business flared brightly and burned out just as quickly. But, this was a really exciting project to work on.
More on my resume / CV at LinkedIn
