This comprehensive guide provides ten essential tips to help business leaders effectively integrate AI into their operations and overall business strategy.
David Blackman
Geospatial and search expert with high EQ
I started my career on Google Maps, working on the coarse geocoder and search mixer.
At Foursquare I worked on many projects, primarily geocoding, the venues database + tooling, events and superuser tools. While there I built an opensource geocoder called twofishes, and commissioned an open source map boundary dataset called Quattroshapes that became the basis for mapzen's Who's On First dataset.
At Twitter I migrated the geospatial pipeline from a snapshotted postgres database to a reproducible m…
Experience
Notion
Senior Staff SWE / NYC Site Lead
Jan 2021 - Jun 2023
Building the next generation all-in-one workspace / knowledge management tool / 1970s back to the future hypertext platform
- Built numerous internal trust & safety / spam tools, maintained and documented internal administrator tooling
- Lead a team of engineers in developing two week formal onboarding curriculum, built the first codelab
- Split notion's public content onto a separate domain for increased resilience
- Decreased search latency by over 50%, increased relevancy by over 10%
- Oversaw implementation of first machine learning model in the product (search ranker)
- Implemented user recommendation model in the product (used by both user search and document search ranking)
- Implemented engineering workflow / developer-experience tooling
- Maintained notion internal developer CLI
- Site lead: Grew NYC from no office to 150+ people in an office in Soho. Implemented NYC onboarding, site updates, offsites and lunch-and-learns,
- Migrated elasticsearch from AWS managed to self-hosted terraform for cost savings, architecture flexibility & performance improvements
- Implemented observability dashboards and tooling for search indexing & serving
- Improved korean, english and japanese stemming in document search
- Created search experimentation framework
- Created search backend routing framework
- Implemented comments sidebar with improved unread comment tracking
Radar
Senior Staff SWE / Engineering Manager
Dec 2019 - Jan 2021
Developer-friendly, privacy-first geofencing and geocoding that helps product and growth teams build amazing location-based app experiences. Radar.io is a tool in the Mapping APIs category of a tech stack.
- Implemented significant improvements to internal developer tooling & testing
- Lead effort to roll out a full suite of geo APIs mainly from open source efforts
- Evaluated multiple open source routing engines, built production/deployment tooling around two of them
- Integrated new source of geographic data across multiple services
- Made contributions back to pelias open source geocoder
Contract Development
Software Engineer
May 2019 - Jan 2020
- Fable: Built initial backend for book club reading app, transitioned project to full time developer.
- Meta: Took over in progress social network + marketplace app from a consulting firm. Rebuilt site with industry best practices + much larger feature set.
- A Little Drive: Built proof of concept for a new kind of list building application, billed as "wirecutter for everyone." https://www.mixlet.com/
Art Sabbatical
Creative Technologist
Feb 2019 - Jul 2019
Exploring the intersection of generative art, immersive experiences, connection and physical accessories.
- Assemble: an immersive theater piece set in the Red Hook IKEA https://blackmad.com/digital-projects/assemble/ - featured in No Proscenium, Time Out and Gothamist
- What is my purpose? an anonymous postcard app http://purpose.blackmad.com
- Blackmadeco: generative art patterns on custom fit leather accessories http://gen1-alpha.blackmade.co/
- Dispatches From Yesterday's Future - expo/react-native app in Apple app store to share feelings & memories from quarantine - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yesterdays-future/id1507282393
- ~ secret immersive temporary covid-19 virtual art project ~
Twitter
NYC Engineering Site Lead
Jan 2017 - Jan 2019
- Lead growth of NYC engineering from ~40 to ~90 people
- Started site-wide new hire orientation
- Met with new hires & coordinated first day with manager
Twitter
Staff Software Engineer / Engineering Manager
Dec 2014 - Jan 2019
It's What's Happening.
- Oversaw development of Twitter Moments feature from initial conception to launch to unification into Events experience
- Managed a team of 20 backend & frontend engineers across two offices and multiple remote locations
- Launched v1 in a tight six month timeframe, followed by rapid iteration
- Set a model within Twitter for speed & quality of product delivery and for team cohesion
- Outsourced & oversaw development of internal editorial tools by a third party development firm
- Worked with a team of editors & curators to build policy and tooling for human curated content on Twitter
- Launched in 15+ countries. Saw continuous growth of usage and stickiness over 2+ years
- Organized efforts into multiple sub-teams with multiple PMs and TLs, lead sprint planning and retros
Foursquare
Staff SWE / Engineering Manager
Aug 2010 - Dec 2014
A social network for places - to record visits and recommend real world places to you and your friends.
- Oversaw the development of Foursquare's venue database and tooling
- Built out geographic infrastructure, including the open source coarse geocoder twofishes, funding Quattroshapes - an open source administrative boundary compilation, and signing a deal with a third party fine geocoder
- Wrote or oversaw almost all of the crowd sourced venue editing tools in use by Foursquare, including the launch of a mobile editing webview in use by the client apps
- Added hours, attributes (good for groups / delivery / etc) and local name translations to venue database capabilities
- Expanded category hierarchy by 2x, worked with external icon illustrator
- Launched event checkins, which involved matching venues with multiple external event providers, deduplicating venues across multiple providers
- Built numerous internal tools including what became s2map.com as well as the venue shape visualization seen in most public presentations
- Managed a team of 5 people owning all of the venues, events, geocoding, tooling and superuser infrastructure
Google
Senior Engineer
Aug 2006 - Aug 2010
- Worked on geocoding and local search