About
I'm a product-driven creative technologist based in New York City with a multi-disciplinary background in research science, humanities, and the arts. At New York Magazine and Vox Media, I worked to deliver award-winning reader experiences and critical back-end services in support of editorial tooling and business development goals during a period of rapid growth (400% YoY) in the e-commmerce and affiliate revenue business.
In recent personal work, I've explored the usage of mobile devices as sonic architecture in Frog Chor.us, and the intersection of archives, machine learning, and music on the early web in MIDI ARCHIVE.
Side Projects
Frog Chorus is an audio-based web application that allows your mobile device or laptop to chirp in a “chorus” of other devices, as if they were a chorus of frogs in the wild.
The app uses the built-in speaker and microphone to have devices listen to and interact with each other, generating a dynamic and spatialized work of sound sculpture. Running Frog Chorus on a single device may generate a few peeps, but will not yield a chorus without proximity to other devices running the app. Instead, Frog Chorus requires active participation from a group, and invites users to become listeners and consider what might come from letting machines do all the talking.
MIDI Archive uses machine learning and archiving to give the visitor various entry-points into the world of music on the early web.
Read more about this project at <medium.com/@reubenson/arc…>.
Weaving Music is an exploration of the materiality of sound through the metaphor of weaving, with the weaving loom re-imagined as a music sequencer. The seeds of this project were formed when first encountering grid notation for weaving patterns in Anni Albers’ On Weaving, which gave the immediate impression of rhythmic music notation.
Work Experience
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Oversaw a team of 7 engineers responsible for growing Vox’s affiliate marketing business ($40M revenue per year) for multiple product recommendation sites, including The Strategist and Pop Sugar.
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Increased developer happiness by giving space to senior engineers to advance in leadership, which led to initiatives like converting a critical codebase to Nest.js and TypeScript, reaching 100% test coverage, and improving service performance, reliability, and maintainability.
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Strengthened cross-team collaboration while serving as a primary contact for maintaining the CMS running the New York Magazine network of sites, including incident response, triaging product requests, leading regular meetings, and providing developer guidance. During my time in this role, there was not a core CMS team, and the ongoing stability of the org required active effort.
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As team lead, architected and developed back-end service (Express API, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch) and front-end Vue application to centralize product information within the CMS, which increased affiliate revenue monetization by more than 50% and vastly improved editorial and business development workflows.
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Led the launch of the award-winning redesign of The Strategist, as well as its UK-internationalized offshoot, cementing its position as a best-of-class source of product recommendations and contributing to a period of rapid growth in affiliate revenue (up 400% YoY).
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Launched microservice that integrates with Amazon’s Product Advertising API to normalize data and update pricing data, improving both the reader experience and monetization of tens of thousands of products.
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Diversified affiliate revenue streams by extending affiliate partners integrations and increased general audience reach by 25% through automation of content distribution into Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, and AMP.