I architected and lead the development of one of the very first email marketing delivery platform called Topica. Our distributed application used Tuxedo for communication, queues for staging batches of recipients, and modified qmail library for SMTP deliveries. Topica built the first ever email marketing engine that not only could track clicks and opens, but could also automate emails to finely tuned audiences, such as those who did not open email, or did not click a particular link. This feature set was about a decade ahead of its time. Unfortunately the company did not survive due to total failure in the business strategy, choosing short-term gains at the cost of long-term survivability. Choosing the wrong customer — mostly spammers who "cheated" on their compliance forms, lead to our IP range being blocked by most large email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL. The sales team had a record year, but they didn’t listen to the smart people reviewing each new customer and rejecting them outright. They rode this while they could, sending a quarter million emails every day, which in 2001 supposedly was 1% of all daily Internet Email.

During evenings and weekends I coded a Java (Spring, WebWork, Hibernate)-based platform for managing SMS/MMS subscriptions to various apps and content services. After about a year of coding, me and my partner incorporated as Drop In Media, LLC, went working full-time and for three years we ran apps and content on Boost Mobile, Verizon and T-Mobile. When US passed the law banning all premium SMS messages except for donations, our business model was over. But, for three years we employed up to ten people, and provided quality content to older phones using our home-grown platform. I eventually hired two outsourced engineers to take over day-to-day coding and worked as a co-founding CTO.

Then I joined a book self-publishing company Blurb.com and with just four other engineers, all of us learned Ruby and Rails at the same time, and we built the e-commerce marketplace from scratch in around three months. The company is still around if you’d like to check it out.

While at ModCloth.com I helped bring in-house and build a top-notch engineering culture at ModCloth.com — a retailer that sells retro-inspired female clothing. The company was later acquired by Walmart.

In 2012 I joined as a co-founding CTO at Wanelo, a product bookmarking site, kind of "Pinterest for Shopping". It was the best job I’ve ever had, because I had an incredibly talented and strong team who agreed to take on full-time pair programming. We also completely rewrote the original Wanelo from Java to Ruby in two months. Wanelo reached 11M active users, but the carelessness of product decisions lead to decline in traffic and an eventual collapse.

More recently I worked at such companies as Homebase, Fossa, Coinbase, HealthSherpa and now I am enjoy the incredible team at Academia.edu.