Category: Work

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Enchanted

Enchanted Diamonds Ring Builder by Material Instinct

Enchanted Diamonds was a NY company specializing in diamond and rare gem retail and wholesale, they were also designers and producers of fine jewelry like engagement and wedding rings, necklaces and pendants, cufflinks, bracelets, among other items.

In September 2018 we were approached to immediately solve several large problems the company was facing with their technology, in addition to redesigning and rebuilding their primary eCommerce platform, and refresh the brand identity. Enchanted was run by Joshua Niamehr, a 4th-generation diamond dealer conducting business in the heart of the NYC diamond district. All sales were transacted on an 8 year old monolithic Ruby on Rails app running on outdated, unmanaged commodity linux hardware hosted on Rackspace. Failures and outages were frequent, daily even.

The first phase of the project was to focus on fixing critical runtime errors, server performance limitations, and failing critical web-scraper cron jobs. We rewrote their cron jobs to run exclusively on AWS Lambda server-less cloud functions for the primary logic, using DynamoDB as ephemeral storage, and CloudWatch as event triggers to fire off each stage in a sequence of functions. We also migrated the 35 GB Postgres DB with millions of records (market data, price changes, user events) and their primary custom Ruby on Rails eCommerce app onto auto-scaling Heroku infrastructure and added comprehensive exception handling & notifications.

Phase 2 was focused on designing & building the user experience for a new modern eCommerce front-end architecture written in JavaScript & ReactJS exchanging data with Postgres through a web-socket hooked up to a lite-weight re-written Ruby on Rails API. We also began development on a totally custom wedding & engagement ring configurator allowing the customer to design & preview 3D models of their desired jewelry written in WebGL, React, and Redux.

In an unlikely and unforeseen turn of events, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2019, curtailing further development on the aforementioned initiatives.

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Baby Phat

BabyPhat - Kimmora Lee Simmons

Remember that juicy urban chic brand BabyPhat from the 90’s? Well they’ve relaunched. Kimora Lee Simmons is back in control of the company, and in partnership with the good people over at Galore Media approached us in early 2019 to design and build their brand new site for the relaunch.

After about 1.5 months of UX prototype design and branding exploration, we chose a path forward and began implementing the designs into a brand new site architecture: a custom Ruby on Rails API running atop Postgres, and a sexy server-side rendered frontend app written in NodeJS + React + Redux.

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GetClark.io

Clark - Your Virtual Wishlist In Real Life

https://GetClark.io

RFID System Build & Custom Retail Apps

“New frontier in retail allows customers to shop their favorite online brands while still being able to experience them in person” – Cheddar TV

Aaron spent 2018 as CTO & lead developer building a new retail tech platform along with developers Noah Shpak, Anthony Grullon, and Nilson Ivano.

Clark bridges the gap between the online and offline worlds through an RFID/NFC/QR enabled mobile shopping cart for brick & mortar retail, as well as a realtime data dashboard for brands to gather insights into consumer behavior, product department or location performance, and overall sales.

The RFID hardware technology used was manufactured by Impinj, installed in a retailer at Water Tower Place in Chicago with on-site Linux hardware and RFID API setup by Aaron, and software developed by Aaron, Noah, and Anthony.

Brand Homepage (https://GetClark.io)
Shopping Cart / Wishlist (https://clrk.me)
Brand Dashboard (https://app.getclark.io)

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Dirty Lemon

“We make better beverages, designed to improve your everyday routine. Exclusively via text.”
https://dirtylemon.com

Dirty Lemon is the first company to handle 100% of their sales via SMS (text-to-buy) conversations. The company commissioned an agency to build their public website, SMS chatbot, and admin dashboard all in Ruby on Rails.

We inherited this project with the app in rough shape. It’s a very large single codebase for all connected parts, there were many bugs, and it was still missing critical features.

Over 5 months we were able to fix mission-critical business-level bugs and add crucial new features like HTTPS/SSL, calculate taxes, intelligently distribute orders to multiple fulfillment centers using a time-in-transit API, validate user signup forms & addresses, hookup a CRM for lead generation/remarketing, track user events, enhance the clarity/personality/capabilities of their chatbot (using some NLP), create the ability for special products & promotions within their dashboard, setup better errors, enhance the design & UX, and more.

We were also the only technical staff working for Dirty Lemon during this time, so we also played the role of DevOps and managed all underlying infrastructure and services. The platform is built atop Heroku, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails, CoffeeScript, KnockoutJS, and Twilio.

You can read more about Dirty Lemon here on CNN.

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Galore

Galore Mag - Material Instinct

We were responsible for the design, development, and management of all Galore’s digital products and websites.

Our team designed, developed, and still maintains several digital products and their underlying infrastructure, including Galore’s social-influencer agency & mgmt system [KittenAgency.com], our mobile-first original video browser/player web app [TV.GaloreMag.com], our online editorial publishing system [GaloreMag.com], and all Galore’s digital newsletter campaigns and some specialty micro-sites. At any given point we have 2-5 engineers switching between code, devops/sysadmin, design & UX, strategy, and content management.

The most common software stack used for Galore’s properties uses NodeJS, React, MongoDB, LESS, Docker, Github, and AWS.
Some of our web properties also use MeteorJS, WordPress/LAMP, Ghost.org, and even a custom NodeJS webapp using the WP-API. All of Galore’s software stacks are described in full detail on https://StackShare.io, and follows 12-step design patterns.

Galore has an audience of over 60MM followers across its networks, publishing hundreds of new written, video, and social content pieces each week.

During issue launches or large press events, our sites often garner major media attention and occasionally receive over 100,000 unique visitors to one of our properties in one day. There were around a dozen times where we had to defend Galore properties from DoS (denial of service) attacks and/or keep the site online during major press events which often cause infrastructure performance/availability issues.

There were often armies of foreign IP addresses requesting static resources thousands of times per second, freezing/locking our servers requiring our engineers to manually manage our IP tables and firewalls to blacklist the attackers’ range of IP addresses. We’ve also setup and managed auto-scaling groups of resources responding to usage limits and traffic volume.

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Lucera Financial Infrastructures

In 2010, we were referred to Cantor Fitzgerald by a dear friend & colleague, Dr. Sasha Stoikov, to lead the design of a memorial site guidebook commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The project was important due to the sensitive & gut-wrenching nature of the historical tragedy which occurred on September 11, 2001, but also because of the complex nature of the memorial name-plates of the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees in the context of the overall 2,977 victims. It was out of this 4 month long project from which the relationship with Cantor was born.

For the next 3 years, 2011-2014, Aaron helped form a Cantor spin-off entity, Lucera.com, providing a high-performance bare-metal on-demand computing platform & a distributed exchange software platform (LumeFX), to Wall Street’s most demanding & mission-critical clients. Aaron was brought on as the Director of Marketing, but quickly broadened scope to include frontend engineering. Aaron strategized & designed all marketing assets & software UX, and developed early versions of three customer-facing web apps, driving business growth in multiple international markets.

Please visit Lucera.com, a Cantor Fitzgerald company, for more information.

Lucera Financial Infrastructures
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Whirlpool

Whirlpool - Good Housekeeping

We designed and executed all aspects of an experiential marketing campaign for Whirlpool in partnership with Good Housekeeping. The pop-up event featured Whirlpool’s latest home appliances in a complete kitchen setup within a roaming glass-cube truck wandering NYC.

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Beringer Guitars

Beringer Guitars - Material Instinct

I was approached by James Bolenbaugh to create an online user-generated interactive guitar museum for his grandfather’s 300+ handmade bespoke guitars.

Being avid music-lovers and musicians ourselves, we naturally jumped at the opportunity to create something really special for these musical works of art.

After about 1.5 months, what resulted was a fun and intuitive scrollable fretboard, comprised entirely of user-submitted stories and photos of each guitar.

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Tablet Magazine

1 Instinct

Tablet Magazine is a widely read general news & politics publication, sharing many writers with the New Yorker & the NY Times. About 30% of Tablet’s readership was accessing the site using mobile devices, and Tablet had absolutely no optimization for mobile or tablet devices. We were commissioned to design & build a mobile web app, offering an experience completely unique from their desktop platform, specifically highlighting key features for mobile devices, like podcast browsing.

https://TabletMag.com