Living in the Past

I have made the move. Starting Monday I'm going to be working at Wanelo, a social media startup working on connecting people with e-commerce. It's an interesting change for me, as two years ago I promised myself I would never work for a social network company. A lot has changed in the last two years, however, and I thought I would take some time to put it down in words (for my own benefit as well as yours, illustrious reader). For the past two years I have worked at ModCloth, an e-commerce fashion company that works with small-medium sized fashion designers to sell vintage-inspired clothing. In the course of my time there, I worked on various features including Be the Buyer, a program to crowd-source product acquisition and merchandizing. I led a team to re-architect the product categories to be based on search indexes, not only making the process by which new products appear on the site more automated and robust (before, every product was manually added and sorted in every category by hand), but allowing us to implement faceted drill-down on almost every category—customers can easily find in-stock dresses that are their color, size and price range. In the end, I worked on systems automation to build new servers in an automated and quick fashion. Hopefully I had some influence in the long term strategy of organizing code into separate applications and services. ...

Well, it’s time. While the old blog had some relevant data (at least to me), it’s time to shuck off the old and begin with the new. As such, I’m going to rely on the Internet Archive to provide historical content.

The analytics of my previous blog and the random connections it would attract were interesting, but there are a few deciding factors to guide this along:

• I have not updated it in about 2 1/2 years
• Most of the content is technologically dated
• Since last writing, I have switched jobs twice (more on that in a later post)