Expedia Group Virtual Agent Chat

The Conversational Experiences Platform manages white label Virtual Agent Chat AI integrations for Expedia brands. The VAC can handle common customer requests and answer internal questions for human agents during support sessions. Brands can customize capabilities using internal tools and configurations.

My initiatives supported internal brands by investigating issues using APM tools to identify and trace requests across the distributed system. After each investigation, metrics reports were shared with remediation recommendations for various teams across different organizations and time zones.

Sansar Virtual Reality Platform

Linden Lab, a pioneer in virtual worlds, endeavored to build a platform for creating and monetizing 3D content called Project Sansar. I spent four years growing as a developer and a human while helping to grow Sansar as a ‘place’ to be. Campfires, concerts, games, classrooms, businesses and hackers, nothing will ever compare. I hold so much gratitude for the investors that allowed artists and scientists to lead and build this incredibly ahead of it’s time platform and for my coworkers that united for a common goal, truly an amazing team to be a part of.

Sansar Web

I primarily contributed to the web frontend of Sansar. As one of five web engineers, I helped bring to life prelaunch marketing and supporting applications for accessing the game through Beta and launch.

Sansar’s web was built using microservices for user account management, the web store, and the game atlas. We designed a modular UI library themed as components shared across different frontend applications in a federated system.

Once the web was templatized, the team cross-trained. Our microservice architecture allowed for easily spinning up new apps using scripts and Docker configurations.

Sansar Game UI

The Sansar game engine, built for Windows and written in C++, used XAML through Noesis to create a highly performant UI. However, this resulted in a time-consuming process for small teams, as building a new panel layout took about the same time as solving complex engine issues.

I was given a chance to work on the game code’s UI. XAML was easy to grasp, but learning C++ and its compiler tools was challenging. I received dedicated mentorship and over the course of one year we were able to implement UI initiatives that would have been otherwise shelved due to resource constraints.

Sansar Mobile

Sansar Mobile application was an extension of Sansar virtual events platform that added the ability to view events from iPhone and Andriod. In reaction to Covid our first show was part of the renowned Glastonbury concert series in England. The 2020 Shangri - La festival went full virtual reality for Lost Horizon shows, artists performed via avatars in Sansar to a live, virtual, audience.

The event was extravagant, custom stages were built to replicate the outdoor experience, state of the art image capture technology was used to stream performers, every detail was professionally crafted to AAA game quality at the time. Merchandise, coined ‘Verch’, was designed and sold to concert goers through the store and injected some earnings into resident wallets as well as introduced a whole new audience to the platform. It was rumored that Fatboy Slim was hanging out on the dance floor completely anonymous enjoying himself as much as everyone else.

Unfortunately this event would be the last of such proportions under Linden Lab. The high cost of production and maintenance was not sustainable as the barrier to entry for VR hardware remained high and the number of daily active users remained low.

Amazon Creative Services

Amazon’s retail storefront underwent a significant transformation thanks to the Amazon Creative Services UX team. They improved the look and feel of the store and patented UX patterns, such as mega dropdowns, that are now common on large retail websites.

While working with Creative Services I assisted UX designers in demonstrating rapid prototyping of dynamic widgets that pulled data from the recommendations engine. The designers coded the widget layouts and styling with instructions for behavior to be integrated into the existing Amazon stack via CMS-controlled slots that could contain server scripts for accessing internal Amazon services and data.

The widgets were designed assuming dynamic backend data for user choices and product browsing, but the data was actually static upon page load. To address this, we hacked an AJAX proxy page via CMS to expose internal APIs by converting PERL query responses into JSON text on a page. This was before the fetch API was added to browsers, and asynchronous activity was more laborious to achieve. However, trusted iframes and JSON-formatted text were easy to grab from the DOM and parse into plain JavaScript in order to make dynamic widgets that required no page reloads.

Disney Interactive

Disney Interactive produced the children’s video games Club Penguin and Pixie Hollow. These were multiplayer online games for children that allowed for interactivity with other players while maintaining barriers around communication in order to safeguard personal information being shared and to protect minors from harassment or vulgar language.

I worked on features like the "Disney Like Button" and “Disney Social Chat” to create embeddable XMPP widgets that could be used across Disney websites as a way to allow kids to participate in an online social network inside protected games like Club Penguin.