Vox

About Vox

Vox is an award-winning free social blogging service from Six Apart. Vox combines an easy to use interface with great design, industry-leading privacy features and integration with many popular social and photo sharing services.

I contributed to Vox as a manager, engineer and technical project manager, and an active participant in product and design direction. I was the primary engineering point of contact for QA, operations, product, ad sales and business development organizations.

Engineering Management

Leading the Vox engineering team, which included developers in the US, France and Japan was a unique and challenging experience. In two years, we shipped 40 major releases, from prototype through public beta, launch, to 4MM+ uniques/month. I’m pleased to note the development process we hammered out became a model for the other product teams at Six Apart.

Over the course of the project, the team grew to a peak of 14 engineers. I was responsible for screening and interviewing candidates for product, engineering, QA and operations. I hired, retained and grew strong engineers in the US and internationally, including coordinating immigration processes for H-1B, L-1 and O-1 visas. Nearly every engineer who worked on Vox has moved into a senior or management role.

Individual Contributions

I participated in the design of the core ORM layer, database schema, APIs, security model and design / theme infrastructure. I architected the ArcheType L10N and branding framework, authentication, security model, access control system and participated in the creation of the Six Apart ad server, advising the core technology group and integrating with web analytics.

As an individual contributor, I was responsible for the open source core JavaScript library, also used in Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal. I created the Vox WYSIWYG rich-text editor with drag and drop “enclosures” and live in-editor spellcheck. I designed and implemented the ad serving and analytics integration.