Jan 2023 – Dec 2024 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area · Hybrid

• Built AI automations for codebase migrations and upgrades that ran in secure dedicated tenants
• Raised $1.9M
• #1 on both Hacker News and Product Hunt
• Closed several large enterprise customers
• Built an automation flow engine and over a hundred codebase mutation tools used by our AI agents
• Ultimately found that these automations belong in the IDE, but we didn't have enough runway to pivot, nor were we in a good position to compete with Cursor or Codeium. Shut it down.

Nov 2020 – Nov 2022 · 2 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area · Remote

• Acquired in 2023
• Raised $21M
• Creator of Flowlang, a Turing complete visual language that is as expressive as code
• Creator of MVF (Model View Flow) software design pattern
• Built the flow engine (logic), style engine, app builder, and cloud infra
• Sourced and hired the first 9/11 team members of the founding team
• Managed an R&D org of 14, including engineers, designers, and PMs

Nov 2018 – Nov 2020 · 2 yrs

• Led the data visualization efforts at Workday via an engineering manager, architect, and product manager role. Managed a team of 5 high caliber data visualization, graphics, and UI engineers
• Recruited top talent from all over the world. Managed an international team.
• Responsible for core data visualization capabilities in the Workday Analytics flagship product, Discovery Boards
• Supported Dashboards, Report Writer, People Analytics (Prague), Slides (Boulder CO), Worksheets (Boulder CO), and other teams with their data visualization needs
• Successfully migrated Workday's D3 data visualization capabilities to Aurora
• Supported cross platform rendering in web, server, iOS, and Android via a TypeScript core, AML protocol, and native renderers.
• Created PowerGrid, a custom high performance React table rendering engine
• Throughout my data visualization journey at Platfora and Workday, I've had the fortune of creating a highly scalable data visualization framework from scratch (Aurora), enabling Platfora customers to see their data like they had never seen before, getting acquired by a multi-billion dollar company (Workday), and then integrating Aurora throughout the company on all major platforms.

Aug 2016 – Nov 2018 · 2 yrs 3 mos

• Led the data visualization efforts across all of Workday. Workday acquired Platfora in 2016. Part of that acquisition was Aurora, which is a custom, high performance rendering engine that supports the exploration of hundreds of thousands of marks in the browser, millions of marks under the right conditions. I am the creator of Aurora. It was also built for extensibility and UX consistency. Built primarily with HTML5 Canvas and SVG (SVG for vectorized text and SVG exports)
• Workday's data visualization efforts at the time of the acquisition consisted mostly of wrappers around D3, which does not scale. Worked to migrate all of these data visualization capabilities over to Aurora.
• Created a FE framework called Axiom, which is like a light weight version of React + Redux, catered to the Workday FE ecosystem which revolves around WUL.
• Ran the scrum team for Aurora core engineers + consuming teams of Aurora. Made several improvements to our Scrum process to improve transparency, efficiency, and estimation accuracy
• Worked with our CTO and VPs to strategize and plan for the future of the Workday FE ecosystem

Sep 2014 – Aug 2016 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Mateo, CA

• Acquired by Workday in 2016
• Created Aurora, a custom, high performance data visualization engine that could render over 1M data points in the browser. Aurora supports multiple renderers, such as HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, and SVG
• Led our FE data visualization efforts
• Improved Vizboard page performance by better managing network requests and improving data cube transformation algorithms
• Created Canteen, which is an open source HTML5 Canvas Testing library
• Created Tabulous, which is an incredibly fast HTML table renderer that can render millions of data cells

May 2013 – Sep 2014 · 1 yr 4 mos · Sunnyvale, CA

• Founded MeteorCharts, Inc., which provided high-performance data visualizations for the web.
• Had a handful of clients, mostly in the financial and engineering sectors
• acqui-hired by Platfora in 2014

Nov 2012 – Aug 2014 · 1 yr 9 mos · Mountain View, CA

• Architected the homepage and the feed from scratch, designed for fast load times and thousands of combinations of feed elements
• Won the company wide hackathon with my entry called Lixr, which is a bookmarklet that enables developers, designers, managers, PMS, and QA to manage A/B tests on the client-side, for local development, staging, and production. Lixr is still used to this day at LinkedIn.
• Kickstarted our next generation JavaScript framework, Atomic
• Created a site-wide framework aimed at accelerating user growth and engagement
• Created the Lego front-end framework which delivers dynamic widgets to different pages, in different contexts, of different sizes
• Lead web dev on the new Homepage built with Dust, jQuery, Backbone, Sass, and Scala
• Built Dr.Claw, an easter egg game inside the LinkedIn homepage, complete with a storyline, progressively more difficult levels, a secret level, and an evil villain named Dr. Claw.

Jul 2011 – Nov 2012 · 1 yr 4 mos · Sunnyvale

• Worked on the Yahoo Video Platform team, which delivered millions of streams each day
• Won the international Hackathon with my entry called Yahoo Snap, which was a modern take on Yahoo's homepage
• Worked on the Photo Sessions feature at Flickr
• Supported all major browsers and devices, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE6 through IE10, iOS phones and tablets, and Android phones and tablets.
• Created several widgets used inside the player, including a related video carousel, overlay screens, and a profiler overlay which graphed different metrics over time using HTML5 canvas, including bit rates, dropped frames, etc, along with performance metrics so that you could see how well the player performed for a given player instance.
• Led our efforts in accessibility by providing hidden controls accessible by screen readers, creating hotkey shortcuts, and building a focus manager that automatically placed focus on specific DOM elements depending on the action that was taken
• Worked on internationalization to support dozens of languages, including RTL (right to left) orientations

Mar 2011 – Jul 2014 · 3 yrs 4 mos · Silicon Valley

• Created KineticJS, which is an open-source HTML5 Canvas JavaScript framework that enables high-performance canvas event-driven applications for both desktop and mobile applications. Monetized with support licenses, sponsors, and ads on the tutorials pages.
• One of the first major HTML5 Canvas libraries available, with thousands of stars on GitHub
• A book was written about it, Instant KineticJS Starter by Packt Publishing
• https://github.com/ericdrowell/KineticJS

Nov 2010 – Nov 2015 · 5 yrs

• Created Html5CanvasTutorials.com, which provides free HTML5 canvas tutorials and labs, and serves about 700,000 unique page views per month. Monetized with Google Adsense and BuySellAds. Each tutorial and lab includes a live demo and editable code via CodeMirror.
• Sold the website to an advertising network, the 8th Network, in 2015
• http://www.html5canvastutorials.com

Jun 2009 – Jul 2011 · 2 yrs 1 mo

• Creator of Yard Viz, a train station simulator.
• Created a geospatial, geo-fencing tool that enabled station engineers to see and analyze train flux through regions around stations or other areas of interest
• Worked on Train Matrix, which was an online spreadsheets/ crosstabs tool for managing inbound and outbound trains