Insomniac

I’m the Director of the Core Technology department at Insomniac Games, which is part of PlayStation Studios. As head of the studio’s engine, tools, and technical art teams, I help balance our work across multiple in-development titles while also ensuring that we’re looking ahead to the game development challenges of the future.

It’s been a joy working with this extremely talented group on cutting-edge titles that push PlayStation hardware to its fullest. This has included Marvel’s Spider‑Man, Marvel’s Spider‑Man: Miles Morales, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and along the way I’ve gotten to partner with Nixxes Software to bring our titles to the PC platform. Soon we’ll have Marvel’s Spider‑Man 2 coming to PS5, with Marvel’s Wolverine and more to follow.

Also, we’re hiring programmers—if you’re interested in coming to work with us, please let me know!

Harmonix CTO

I had the opportunity to hold the CTO position at Harmonix Music Systems from 2015 until my departure in 2018. Over that time, I directed (and contributed to) the ongoing development of our internal engine and audio technology. I made a number of process and technology changes to enable efficient and effective development, with a particular focus on developing simultaneous projects on multiple platforms. In the last ~3 years I was there, we shipped 9 titles on 7 platforms, with a team of less than 30 engineers.

Special Projects

I was the programmer on the initial DropMix team before Harmonix’s partnership with Hasbro. We spent just under a year developing prototypes of our music-mixing card game to flesh out the concept and make a compelling publisher pitch for the technology.

Around 2013 I began porting Harmonix’s engine and toolchain to iOS and Mac OS X in my free time, learning much about engine development and low-level programming in the process. This included refactoring swaths of our platform layer, porting our DirectX 11 renderer and shader system to Metal, and getting our asset pipeline functioning on OS X. This culminated with a live on-stage game demo at Apple’s 2015 announcement event for the Apple TV—a long story but a one-of-a-kind experience.

Fantasia

From 2011 to 2014, I was the Lead Programmer on Fantasia: Music Evolved, a collaboration with Disney based on the classic film. Working with a company like Disney on such a historic property had its challenges, but we shipped a beautiful, ambitious product that gave the player more creative agency than any previous Harmonix game. The development team grew as large as ~90 by the time we finished. I had the opportinuty to give multiple presentations about our work on Fantasia at SIGGRAPH 2014.

Rock Band

Prior to working on Fantasia, I’d been in a lead role on the cancelled Rock Band Sessions. I worked on multiple Harmonix games on the UI and metagame teams, including Rock Band 3, The Beatles: Rock Band, and Rock Band 2. I also contributed code to Green Day: Rock Band and the Rock Band Network.

Education

Before starting full-time at Harmonix, I did my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at MIT, finishing my thesis with the UID Group at CSAIL. During school I interned at Harmonix, working a tiny bit on Guitar Hero, as well as at Google on the embeddable Calendar feature.