Introduction

Topaz Labs software helps photographers make their photos look great.

We're fortunate to have been profitable since the beginning; we've never taken any outside funding. Although we started off doing video quality enhancement plug-ins for After Effects and Final Cut Pro, we quickly found out that many more people loved to make their photos beautiful. From there, our new flagship product Topaz Adjust helped us pave the path forward.

Until we started hiring, I wore two main hats as co-founder:

• Website design and development
  Created website entirely in PHP/MySQL, jQuery, and HTML/CSS. Included integrated forum, gallery, knowledge base, and other modules.
• Marketing
  Helped foster a strong community presence with an emphasis on truly exceptional customer support and response to feedback. Implemented rigorously tracked advertising efforts for more exposure.

I'm proud that we made a difference in people's lives by enabling them to easily make great photos. As it happens, it was also a tremendous experience and an eye-opening immersion into the fast-paced world of startups.

Introduction

Zonted is a humorous photo discovery site launched with Bernard Huang.

Everyone likes funny pictures, but most only make us laugh once. So, we decided to build a photo discovery engine where an amused visitor can instantly jump from photo to photo submitted by the community. Unlimited funny pictures, guys! We'll never need to work again!

Armed with this knowledge, we decided to implement tons of cool features, including:

• An intelligent machine learning algorithm that determines the optimal photo to show based on preferences of other visitors with similar taste
• Daily mailing list with top-ranked photos and best image submitters
• Gamification of user actions like voting, commenting, and image submissions to encourage interactivity
• T-shirts displaying top-rated photos and other crowdsourced designs
• StumbleUpon-style advertisements sold to "edgy" companies looking for ad insertion into our photo discovery stream

Too bad we actually didn't get around to doing any of that, since we both became too busy with other things to mess around with a funny photo site written in spaghetti PHP. Oh well.

Interestingly enough, Zonted still has a 30-40% bounce rate and 22 average page views per visitor. Check it out, you'll probably get a few laughs or get really offended, depending on who you are.

Introduction

cVisual is an online hybrid business card / resume site that gives a quick overview of the card's owner.

Instead of a dry business card, a cVisual card shares background and updated activities with the reader. The idea was that this information enables easier collaboration and better context than a piece of paper with your name on it. It also functions as a personal online presence, similar to about.me, but with hosted instead of aggregated information.

The first iteration shown here took 6 weeks of coding to complete with extensive use of PHP and jQuery. After the first iteration, the feedback I received determined that the interest level didn't merit additional development, so I scrapped this project in favor of a new (forthcoming!) initiative based on Rails.

Introduction

Create a beautiful online resume quickly and easily with YouResume.

Resumes, some of most boring and ubiquitous documents in existence, are now be a little more ubiquitous but a lot less boring. Although most resumes are pdfs because of portability, many people still want an online, easy-to-update, and linkable resume. YouResume makes this possible with a quick resume editor and slick front-end presentation. Future features may include different resume templates, pdf import and export, and other stuff if people find this project useful.

This was my first non-trivial application built in Rails instead of PHP, and I'm impressed with how well everything flows together in Rails. For example, the way javascript and ajax is handled with .js.erb files is very elegant, and my whole experience with Rails was just awesome all around. After a few years of coding in framework-less PHP, Rails is the nuts.