I directly contributed to the following major projects by providing either technical and strategic oversight or directly contributing to coding and planning/estimations. I’m particularly proud of these projects as they are used by millions daily. Many projects I’ve worked on have completely transformed the way many of these major businesses interact with their web audiences.
Google Site Kit
Google Site Kit is Google’s first official open source WordPress plugin, integrating Google services such as Search Console, Analytics, Adsense, Pagespeed Insights, and Optimize tools into websites. 10up worked with Google to make this plugin a reality, launched in June 2019.
As director, I oversaw the planning and development of the initial beta version of this project to launch. I worked closely with Google engineers to develop approaches for complex integrations of Google’s APIs to work seamlessly within an open source, distributed plugin, which presented its own unique challenges. A custom authentication proxy was developed to accommodate restrictions of oAuth authentication flow.
Google Site Kit has been downloaded and installed on over 3 million active websites.
Meta (Facebook)
I oversaw a team of 10+ engineers at 10up who specialize working on Meta’s projects, utilizing their technology stack, and contributing to internal projects for the Meta monorepo, which includes the code for Facebook, Instagram, and other popular projects.
The technologies used included Hack, React, Relay, Flow, GraphQL, and many other proprietary technologies created and used by Meta. These projects were a new challenge for the team, as the technology stack and processes were atypical from what they were used to.
I defined the processes, standards, and workflows the team used, which improved the accuracy of planning and estimation for these projects.
Meta Projects
Screenshots omitted due to not being able to share proprietary information
- Meta Asset Manager Tool – All of Meta’s projects (from Facebook to Instagram to WhatsApp) use their internal ‘Asset Manager’ tool to provide a central service and location for uploading images used on various web and mobile projects. 10up was hired to build and implement a redesign for this tool. We rearchitected the backend to make it more efficient and implemented a revamped front end as well as tracking and performance measuring tools
- Meta Research Internal Tools – Meta’s research team has many dashboards and custom-built tools that help expedite research requests and to track the research process. My team helped build these dashboards and tools to help improve visibility into the research areas at Meta.
- Stack CMS – Meta’s proprietary internal CMS system is used to build external websites for marketing and informative purposes. My team extended their Stack CMS system to include new features and build out many high-traffic websites for Meta.
Salesforce.com
I worked closely with Salesforce’s web engineering leadership to plan the architecture for their new enterprise website, salesforce.com. This project was kicked off with a multiple-day in-person planning session to understand their needs and engineering standards and put together an in-depth requirements document that detailed the migration from their previous CMS (Adobe Experience Manager).
Once the requirements were written by the engineering team, a team of 6 engineers put together the blog and newsroom sections of their website as well as custom functionality and features that served as the foundation and framework for additional websites added to the network. They are now poised to deliver content to our global community in multiple languages efficiently, and soon we’ll scale this infrastructure and design system to nearly 20 markets worldwide.
10up worked closely with Salesforce’s engineering team to perform co-development to teach them the skills that would be needed for them to continue to build out additional website features and functionality. We developed a custom CI/CD workflow to adhere to Salesforce’s specific enterprise security requirements and implement automated testing.
NESN.com / NESN App
NESN (New England Sports Network) is a popular website and TV network for die-hard New England sports fans. 10up was directly involved with the relaunch of nesn.com and the NESN App, which were fully reconceptualized to deliver a cutting-edge, cross-platform experience.
I oversaw the planning engineering work for this new digital experience and provided support to a team of 7 engineers.
The new site includes a custom editorial experience; expanded video capabilities; tight integration with their all-new iOS, Android, Roku, Chromecast, and Apple TV apps; live scores and statistics; unique editorial content; and the ability for fans to customize content based on their personal profile and preferred teams through personalization integrations.
A custom REST API middleware was developed to allow any apps that tie into the website to access near-live sports scores and schedules.
Motor Trend Group
Motor Trend provides consumers expert car reviews, vehicle comparisons, and sneak peeks of upcoming models. Published and managed by Motor Trend Group, Motor Trend’s publications reach millions of readers each month through its print publication, website, and social media presence.
I led a large team of 10+ developers to create a new network of websites for many of their web publications, including motortrend.com, automobilemag.com, hotrod.com, and roadkill.com. These websites include complex integrations for vehicle image/data processing and sharing of content and images across websites across the network of sites. The Motor Trend website won a people’s choice Webby award in the Websites: Car Site & Car Culture category.
The project featured a major migration from their old CMS. Following several rounds of preliminary testing and refinement to the migration scripts, 10up rapidly migrated the massive archive of content to the new platform by using multiple servers to complete the process in just a few days. Carefully coordinating the timing of migration scripts to occur during off hours for the editorial team, TEN was able to move forward without any disruptions to their publishing workflows, let alone the reader experience.
Wild Symphony App (Dan Brown)
I oversaw this fun project, bringing author Dan Brown’s dream of an AR app a reality. In 2020 Dan published a children’s book, Wild Symphony, which included accompanying classical music pieces that he composed himself. Dan’s dream was for an app to automatically detect which page of the physical book a child was on, which would automatically play the classical music piece, changing automatically as the child flipped the pages.
This augmented reality functionality was implemented by utilizing TensorFlow, a machine-learning platform that allowed us to train the app to recognize specific pages from the book. The app was written in React Native and published to iOS and Android devices in over 20 different languages.
“This is just a note of thanks to all of you for such a magical app! Kids are loving it, and the experience is everything I had hoped it would be. I appreciate all of your time and energy bringing this project to life.”
Dan Brown
MaineToday Media
Centralized Web Publishing Platform
With four daily newspapers and numerous regional newspapers reaching more than 1.2 million unique readers per month, MaineToday Media is the largest publisher in the state of Maine. While consolidation of the local print media market created opportunities for strategic acquisitions, each acquisition included its own publishing systems. Several systems included convoluted or manual workflows to transition print stories to the web, syndication between publications proved challenging, and over time, MaineToday Media’s central print-to-web software had grown outdated and costly to maintain.
To cut costs and stay competitive in the rapidly changing news landscape, MaineToday Media needed to streamline the publishing process by centralizing all content in a single place, creating efficiencies in content syndication, and moving to a modern web-to-print platform.
This project demonstrates how complex custom workflows can be implemented that saves an organization time and money in the longrun.
WordPress Integration With InDesign
MaineToday Media’s unique needs called for a new solution to integrate their central web publishing platform with InDesign.
10up leveraged ExtendScript to create a custom InDesign plugin to connect with WordPress. Within InDesign, designers launch a file browser, enter search terms or other filters, such as publication date, publication, category, or newspaper section, and a custom REST API endpoint returns article results from WordPress. The endpoint provides stories in InDesign custom IDML XML with custom print styles for each publication and images associated with stories are placed in the InDesign layout in raw format. If designers need to send stories to editors for changes, another custom REST API endpoint sends content edits back to WordPress and saved to the print story as a new revision. Editors are then notified of the new revisions.
Demonstration of custom InDesign integration:
Custom Integrations for External Content
MaineToday Media’s new publishing system required integrations with third-parties used to provide content and assign photographers to stories.
To maintain MaineToday Media’s integration with Associated Press (AP), 10up engineered a feed with logic to inject the AP XML feed into draft WordPress posts. Editors review the drafts and move select drafts into their publishing workflow with one click. For breaking news, drafts can be automatically published to the web without any additional intervention.
An integration with SCC MediaServer leveraged the REST API to enable MaineToday Media to manage photography assignments within WordPress and push the assignments to the SCC MediaServer platform. When photos are uploaded to SCC MediaServer, they are pushed to WordPress in raw format, resized for the web, and associated with the content package that requested the assignment.
A Digital-first Future
MaineToday Media is successfully using the new web-to-print publishing system for their daily newspapers and continues to add new properties to their network. By bringing the entire authoring workflow and third party integrations into a central site, the publisher enjoys a reduction in maintenance costs and an increase in team efficiency. 10up is proud of the long-term partnership with MaineToday Media and delighted to support their transition to a digital-first approach.