Howie Spielman - Professional Background

I recently concluded an 18 month experience at VideoJax. In spite of some good forward progress on a number of fronts, the company was unable to raise a B round, and the doors closed in late 2009. It's disappointing, but sadly too common these days...

While full-time employment leading a technology group for a growing company is my primary goal, I realize that under the current climate I may need to fill in for a while with contract/advisory roles. In the first half of 2010 I've done contract work for Viscira and Rich Relevance, both in San Francisco.

The first section below summarizes my interests and goals for a full-time position, which would be my preference. The second section includes some additional skills that may be better suited for a contract opportunity if necessary.

My full resume is also available as a PDF document.

For Full-Time Positions

My professional strengths and the challenges I enjoy fall in these areas, which have made up most of my full time duties dating back to the early 90’s. I manage technical teams, track and evaluate new technologies, work with product management, sales, and marketing on the product roadmap, with finance on the cost structure and budget for IT, and with the management team and board on the overall direction and identity of the company.

Some of these skills contribute to larger initiatives that are only brought to fruition over time, but some also may lend themselves to shorter contract engagements (from a couple of weeks to a few months).

  1. Executive/Management – For a mature company or a startup: contribute to corporate strategy & the company's direction, provide team leadership, guide career growth and development of management candidates.
  2. System Architecture – Oversee technology selection and unification/consolidation. Guide application and DB modeling and design.
  3. Product Development – Lead the technical design and delivery of product features and roadmap. Guide the assimilation of new technologies into existing product line. Improve development lifecycle through application of industry best practices, processes and automation tools.
  4. Production Operations – Assess current operations and technologies used. Deliver stability, performance, and scalability consistent with corporate growth strategy. This includes setting, tracking, and achieving various business SLAs. Assess cost structure and manage costs aggressively.
  5. Business Intelligence – Identify key business metrics and drivers, and then determine what data is available (or required) to extract business intelligence via reports, data visualizations, live “dash-boards”, etc. Deliver the technical implementation of data collection, extraction, consolidation, reporting, and visualization.
  6. Technology R&D – Understand what really works, and how. Track emerging technologies, identify those that might help the company/product, and conduct tests targeted at assessing them with respect to those needs.

For Contract/Advisory Work

I almost shudder to admit it, but I still maintain strong and current hands-on skills with several programming languages. My overall ability to structure programs in any language that reflect the goals and needs of both product and operations is far above average. My Flash Actionscript programming (but not creative design) skills are far above average (and this may represent one of the most sought after skills in the market over the last few years). The following may best lend themselves to short or medium term contract opportunities, where an individual contributor or member/leader of a small team is required.

  1. Flash – Actionscript 2 and 3 coding (including Flex and AIR), with great strength in the complex assembly of loosely coupled components, use of audio and video, data visualization, and network monitoring. Several of my recent projects include a multi-player video trivia game (for VideoJax), and a multi-channel audio synthesizer (a personal project).
  2. Other languages – PHP, Java, C#. I have used all of these in the last few years for web sites, web services, operations utilities, and data visualization. I did contribute to several portions of VideoJax’s production Java code, and designed and prototyped all of the application metrics embedded in the code.