Whoever says the media industry is dying needs to take a look at Time. With an impressive portfolio of successful, growing magazines and online properties, Time decided to get involved in e-commerce by acquiring StyleFeeder. As part of that team, Eric joined Time.
The team immediately set about making a new shopping site tailored to the savvy readers of InStyle magazine. To accomplish this, the engineering team doubled in size in a very selective recruitment effort spearheaded by Eric.
Where StyleFeeder was intended to by autonomous and driven by algorithms, StyleFind integrated a strong editorial angle. Eric’s primary responsibility with the new project was to build a back-end system designed to give editors and data enrichment specialists the tools they needed to give the site the polish the audience expected.
Eric is a technical force to be reckoned with. I have seen him tackle work in days that might have taken a small team weeks to complete (e.g. rewriting an entire app’s UI from Flex to jQuery). His familiarity with various open source projects led to good decisions for our teams infrastructure. He has excellent instincts in terms of architecting systems, produces extremely clean and readable code, and designs with scalability in mind.
- Bryan Barkley, Senior Software Engineer at Time Inc.
Eric also helped mold StyleFeeder’s popular “explorer” interface into a series of variations. He handled adding additional data facets, analytics, and oversaw the UI engineering required to cleanly integrate the site into several different brands including InStyle and Essence as well as seasonal promotions.
Eric is skillful, knowledgeable, and extremely productive, and he’s welcome company as well. I and my team have also enjoyed maintaining and reusing, for years, the code and systems he built at StyleFeeder and can attest to the overall quality, architectural soundness, and readability of the systems he built.
- Alex Nauda, Director of Shopping Technology at Time Inc.
Eric would like to thank Phil Jacob, Alex Nauda, Eric Kilby, Bryan Barkley, Matt Casebeer, Omar Baba, Ryan Jones, Shergul Arshad, Lee Kurland, Abe Cytryn, and John Carles as well as the editorial and data enrichment teams for their invaluable work in all of these efforts.
Project & Position Requirements
- Realtime workflow reporting
- Identify and hire new engineers
- Complex product publishing lifecycle
- Leverage existing StyleFeeder codebase
- Provide editorial tools for building content
- Provide specialized data enrichment interfaces
- Merge machine-learning based data with human input
Technical Highlights
- JMS-based message bus
- Public XML/JSON APIs
- Solr-based product search
- CXF-based SOAP web services
- Java (Spring) web application
- High-performance caching layer
- Specialized Ajax/jQuery-based interfaces
- Asset publication via Amazon S3 and Akamai