Greg Schechter

Schechter Natural History

https://schechterguides.com/

Founder

We're building field guides for the modern explorer. Schechter Natural History's Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of North America is the most comprehensive digital field guide available. It contains illustrations and details for over 600 different species of herps (reptiles and amphibians).

Lyric

https://www.lyric.com/
https://www.usewheelhouse.com/

Engineering Manager and Staff Engineer of the Guest Delight Consumer Lead

Lyric is working hand-in-hand with the largest multi-family companies to design & manage a new category of accommodations. We design and operate locally inspired short term rental properties that offer a professional, reliable and delightful experience, far above what travelers get when they rent from an individual homeowner. Our proprietary software and data platform sits at the core of our company. This technology drives our best-in-class margins through optimal site location and advanced revenue management. It also helps us deliver amazing guest experiences through thoughtful automation and personalization.

• First, engineering fulltime hire. Help the company grow from a pre-seed start-up focused on dynamic pricing, to the multifaceted company focused on designing & managing a new category of accommodations with the largest multi-family operators.
• As a Tech Lead with the Wheelhouse Product from 2016 to 2018, I led a team of 5, working in Ruby and React, to build Wheelhouse's first in class personalize pricing platform.
• As the Engineering Manager and Staff Tech Lead of the Guest Delight Consumer team, I led a team of 10, working in Python, React, and GraphQL, to build Lyric's direct booking platform, mobile app, and numerous other guest-facing products.
• Mentored and coached direct reporting engineers as well as other members of the organization.
• Technical Experience: Ruby, Python, React, GraphQL

Boostable

https://www.boostable.com/

Engineering Manager and Front End Lead

• Acquired by Metric Collective
• Coordinated and led team in building V3 of Boostable's self service product for merchants
• Architected and Built Dashboard tool for Boostable's self service product for marketplace admins
• Push "Czar": Developed, maintained, and led deployment process
• Built CLI tool for managing release branches and staging/production deployments
• Fullstack Software Engineer
• Awesome front-end Engineering in React, Babel and Webpack
• Built out testing framework in Nightwatch.js and Casper.js

Facebook

Senior Front End Engineer

• Senior Web Developer on Video Publisher Team
• Built internal tools for Onavo data analysis
• Tech Lead for internal JavaScript Data Visualization Framework
• Developed charts and visualizations for Facebook Insights projects
• Created Advertising Interfaces for Ads Create Flow

YouTube

Web Dev

• Core member of the Web Developer team.
• Tech Lead and evangelist for the YouTube HTML5 Player.
• Creater of the JavaScript API for YouTube iframe embeds.
• Accessibility Lead
• Fools expert: The YouTube Collection, HTML5 Rickrolling
• Assisted with the development of YouTube Feather, YouTube 3D for HTML5, Live Streaming, Upload Widget, and other various projects.

Developer Advocate

• Member of the YouTube Developer Relations Team
• Helped launch and promote YouTube API's
• Hosts YouTube Developer Live

Amazon

Software Dev Engineer

• Enhanced the Amazon user base ability to gift, by designing and developing a new gift card ordering interface.
• Lead various front-end performance initiatives within the company and across multiple teams.
• Assisted with site wide advanced image compression research.

Google

Software Engineer for YouTube Core Product Intern

• Developed the first iterations of an experimental playlist toolbar.
• Led the proposal to make YouTube the world's largest deployment of semantic markup.
• Set up analytics and developed new user interface for YouTube's click to buy monetization initiatives.

Yahoo

Technical Yahoo for Search Submit and the Yahoo Widgets Intern

• Created widgets for the Yahoo Widget gallery.
• Automated the billing reports for all of Search Submit's content providers and resellers.
• Developed a variety of hacks which competed in Yahoo's various competitions.
• Won Best Hack at Yahoo! Internal Hack Day Summer 2007, the details of which are confidential, as this feature was judged innovative enough to be implemented in the future.

Motorola

3GSM System Tester Intern

• Conducted tests on many of Motorola's first 3G cell phones
• Designed and created all software components of an automatic sim dispenser. Using PHP and MySQL, created a web-based system where workers can reserve, check out, and check in SIMs to use for their testing.
• Assisted in the creation of the new mobile devices system test website. Gathered and formatted contact and region specific information for the international regions of our team.

Talks for Conferences

I Want my LOLCat Videos Faster

A talk about Front-end Performance at YouTube.

Given at Reflections | Projections 2010.

HTML5, Flash and the Battle for Faster Cat Videos

HTML5; it's new, it's awesome, and it's powerful, but can it take down the champ of video distribution, Flash. Which technology's got the ability to bring cat video to the next level? This talk covers the many challenges of both HTML5 and YouTube adapting to change video distribution on the web.

Given at Wash U, Carnegie Mellon, WebDU 2011, Velocity 2011, Google Developer Days 2011, jsdays 2012, Fluent 2012, RIT 2013, Codemotion Berlin 2013, Developer week/Web Developer Conference Nuremberg 2013 and as a O'Reilly Media Webcast.

• HTML5 Slide Deck
• Post from Google Developer Day Japan.
• Interview with O'Reilly.
• SlideShare Slides.
• YouTube videos.

YouTube's iframe Player: The Future of Embedding

YouTube players allow for video playback in web applications. The latest YouTube's embedded iframe player supports both Flash and HTML5 video and exposes a rich API which lets you control the YouTube playback experience. We'll give you details on how the API was developed, and show you how it can power the videos on your own website.

Given at Google I/O 2011.

• YouTube video.

Mobile Meow: Bringing YouTube Videos to a Mobile World

This is the story of the glory and struggle of bringing a high quality YouTube experience to the mobile web. Once upon a time there was a web developer who wanted to play videos on the web. So he filmed a cat and wrote a Flash and a HTML5 player. He spent many hours making it work on his favorite desktop browsers and even the one his grandfather still used. People could watch his cat video, he smiled, and the world was good. Then one day someone put a browser in a phone and soon there were many phones with many different browsers. This new set of environments were even harder to develop for and had a slew of new terrifying bugs. The web developer was miserable knowing people couldn't watch his cat video. With much time and effort he figured out many of the secrets needed to combat the evils of the different mobile platforms. Once again people could watch his cat video, he smiled, and the world was good. The end.

Given at WebDU 2012, Mobilism 2012, jsdays 2012, Codemotion Rome 2013, and Developer week/Web Developer Conference Nuremberg 2013.

• Vimeo Video
• Codemotion Rome Slide Deck
• Slide Deck

HTML5 at YouTube: Stories from the Front Line

Is HTML5 ready for production code? Of course it is. This is a look into all the different HTML5 technologies we use in live code at YouTube. We'll have a collection of tips, tricks, and best practices for HTML5 video, the track tag, getUserMedia, and more. Plus a deep dive into Mobile Video Tag development.

Given at Google I/O 2012 and University of Illinois Web Conference 2013.

• YouTube Video
• Slide Deck

Publications

Dynamic style - manipulating CSS with JavaScript, on Opera's Web Standards Curriculum and The Web Education Community Group

Blog Posts

Young Innovators @ Google - Greg Schechter, Google Student Blog

Videos and Interviews

• YouTube Developers Live: HTML5 at YouTube
• HTML5, Flash and online video: Greg Schechter interviewed at Fluent 2012
• Google I/O 2012 - HTML5 at YouTube: Stories from the Mobile Front
• Greg Schechter & Eugene Goldin | Bring Youtube to the Mobile Web | Mobilism 2012
• GDD 2011 Japan: HTML5, Flash and the Battle for Faster Cat Videos
• GDD 2011 Israel: HTML5, Flash and the Battle for Faster Cat Videos
• Google I/O 2011: YouTube's iframe Player: The Future of Embedding

Computer Languages

Library Experiences

React, Babel Nightwatch.js Capser.js jQuery, Google Closure

replux

http://gregthebusker.github.io/replux/

sprity-js

https://www.npmjs.com/package/sprity-js

tailorbird

https://www.npmjs.com/package/tailorbird

ebird

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ebird

Birder Vs Birder

http://www.birdervsbirder.com

It's not just for the birds. Track and Compete in exciting birding challenges with your friends.

• Developed a fun bird watching site, where users can track and compete in contest
• Built with React, Firebase, Heroku
• Automated Tests with Travis

Project Babbler

https://github.com/ProjectBabbler

• A collection of bird watching related tools

Scheedule

Founder and developer of www.scheedule.com. Scheedule is a scheduling website to assist students with the class registration process.

• Created and maintained all data sources for this project.
• Wrote numerous scripts in Perl, PHP, and Java to gather information about the Universities, including class information, seating information, and building maps and locations.
• Designed and developed both back end support and front end design of many unique features of Scheedule.
• Developing Scheedule for multiple schools around the nation.

Ocarina 2.0

• Exploratory development in using breath as a control via game demos using Microsoft's C# XNA framework.
• Modified an Xbox controller to include a pressure sensor to sense how hard the user is breathing.

Psychic Searcher

• Web application tool which automatically analyzes what a person is writing about, and provides them with relevant information including websites, news results, and Yahoo Answers.
• Developed in PHP, YUI, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

Slide Rule Widget

• Found at the Yahoo Widget's library.
• Independently designed and created a slide rule widget whose main purpose is to teach its users how to use a slide rule.
• This widget includes a traditional slide rule, a cylindrical slide rule, a non-logarithmic slide rule, a hexadecimal slide rule, and a tutorial, along with other features to facilitate computation.
• This widget won first place at the UIUC and National University Yahoo! Hack Day competitions.
• A video of my presentation can be found here.

Sholarships

• Crowe Chizek and Company LLC Outstanding Computer Science Student 2008.
• Paul Horwitz Compassion Scholarship 2005.

Yahoo Awards

• Yahoo! University Hack Day 2008: Best Music Application
• 2008 Yahoo Open Hack Day: Most Impromptu Hack Award.
• Yahoo! Search Monkey Developer Challenge: Best Enhanced Result.
• Yahoo! Internal Hack Day Summer 2007: Best Hack for a confidential project.
• Yahoo! Intern Widget Contest: Best Use of Yahoo! APIs.
• Big Thinkers Video Contest: 2nd Place for jumpcut video.
• Yahoo! University Hack Day 2006-2007: First place for Slide Rule Widget at both UIUC and National competitions.

Yahoo Awards

• Engineering Open House 2006: Collaborative Text Editor received 3rd place in the category of the theme exhibit 'Beyond Imagination'.

Eagle Scout: 2004

Primary Student Advisor for UIUC's Web Technology Courses

With a professor's assistance created an exploratory course in web technologies to integrate web technology courses into the college's computer science curriculum.

Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)

Member of SigSoft; a special interest group for software.

Engineering Learning Assistant

Teacher of an introductory course for the college of engineering at the University of Illinois.

Peer Advisor for the Computer Science Department

Yahoo Ambassador

Organized events for Yahoo, including a student Hack Dinner.

• San Francisco Puzzled Pint Host
• Certified Frog Monitor
• Assisted with research on the movements and habits of Dicamptodon tenebrosus (Coastal Giant Salamander): Summer 2010
• American Birding Association Life Lister in Illinois and California