This is my portfolio of professional work. See also my hobby and side projects.

Code.org

March 2014-present

Launched in 2013, Code.org is a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color. I joined Code.org in March 2014 as part of their ~10-person engineering team. In addition to my work on Code Studio, I contribute to various aspects of our web technology infrastructure, teacher professional development organization, and volunteer efforts with industry partners.

Code Studio

Code Studio is an open-source, web-based series of kid-friendly computer-science lessons designed to be used in classroom settings. Our latest K-5 program containing three 20-hour courses for elementary students was developed over Summer 2014 and launched in September 2014. I worked closely with our education and engineering teams and several level-editing interns, developing the content-creation tools used to author this new curriculum. Code Studio currently reaches over 1.2 million students per month as of October 2014, with the new K-5 curriculum reaching over 300 thousand students in its first month since release.

ZipZapPlay/PopCap San Francisco

September 2010-September 2012

ZipZapPlay was a independent social games startup, acquired by PopCap to become their San Francisco office in April 2011, just months before PopCap’s own acquisition by Electronic Arts in July 2011. In addition to working on Baking Life and PvZ: Adventures, I participated in several of PopCap’s “PopCamp” week-long prototyping sessions.

Plants vs. Zombies: Adventures

I worked on the Facebook game, Plants vs. Zombies: Adventures, from its initial prototyping phase in July 2011 until mid-production in September 2012. I designed and implemented the game’s data-driven, component-oriented game architecture, and the creation of an optimized 2D rendering engine featuring blitting techniques and a quadtree-based dirty rectangle algorithm that vastly outperformed the Flash Platform’s proprietary 2D engine, enabling the game to feature many high-quality animated objects on screen. The game was released in May 2013, reaching an audience of over 8 million monthly active users in August 2013, and was shut down in October 2014.

Baking Life

I worked on the Facebook game, Baking Life, from shortly after its initial launch in May 2010 through its shutdown in January 2012. Working as a contractor in Summer 2010, I implemented Facebook Sharing features that directly contributed to the game’s viral growth, on its way to becoming a top 25 facebook game with over 6 million monthly active users.

After joining the company full-time in September 2010, I worked closely with the company’s producers, artists and game designers implementing feature updates and new game mechanics including a messaging center that integrated with Facebook Requests. I also heavily optimized the rendering engine, implementing a bitmap caching algorithm that vastly increased the game’s performance on memory-constrained devices.

Javaground

July 2007-March 2010

Javaground was an independent mobile game development company that provided game creation tools, provided porting services to companies such as Sony, Disney and Capcom, and developed its own mobile games and services. I worked at Javaground from July 2007 until the company’s closure in March 2010.

Xpressed.com

Launched March 2009, Xpressed.com was a mobile game marketplace for developers and publishers to sell their content directly to consumers. I was lead developer on the project, building the web architecture, a mobile game emulator Java applet, and payment provider integrations.

Xpress Suite

I worked on several features for Xpress Suite, Javaground’s mobile game development middleware supporting over 1000 unique mobile devices, including Java ME to C++/BREW source code translation and a high-level game engine library.

Game development and porting

I worked on several of Javaground’s original mobile game development projects, including lead developer on Squared!, Pocket Gold and Karate (unpublished) for the iPhone, and assisted development of The Inferno and Uniwar (review) for iPhone and Android.

I also worked on contract porting projects, including Ghouls ‘N Ghosts (Capcom) and Family Guy: Stewie’s Arsenal (Airborne), porting these games to over 200 J2ME/BREW mobile devices across multiple US carriers, optimized mobile game application code to function across memory and resource-constrained devices.