This is the C.V. of Michael Fanuzzi – a Portland-based, globally-minded Director, Creative Technologist¹, Engineer, Artist

...as Independent Consultant, DIRECTOR, CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST, DEVELOPER, ARTIST: 1999-present

I solve problems for clients large and small, helping creative teams run at their very best, from ideation to delivery. Whether overhauling an identity, conceptualizing a product, refining digital marketing strategies, or creating engaging interactive experiences. I am that strategic “multi-modal creative,” technical director and keen collaborator who will direct your projects from the vantage of two decades' expertise and insights. Delivering the goods for Nike, AnalogFolk, Instrument, Air Paris, Google, the New York Times and many more. I also make a lot of tools and artifacts just to bring joy and enable playful experiences, because I want more of that to exist in the world.

• Leading complete web redesign for Movie Madness, a Portland film institution and ephemera museum now owned by the Hollywood Theatre (React, Django, Redis, Elasticsearch, Bootstrap, webpack), currently in discovery
• Led 2019 web redesign for Portland's Hollywood Theatre, with a focus on enhancing accessibility and aesthetics, pro-bono
• Consulting with countless brands and agencies to direct web strategy, build teams, make platform decisions, grow business and create delightful interactions
• Developing generative audio-visual art experiments/physics games for web that explore themes of perpetual motion (Blender, three.js, OpenGL, Unity, OpenCV)
• Engineered, produced audio for Medium, national & international podcasts
• Led large-scale database migrations, CRM migrations, CMS migrations (MSSQL, MySQL, PSQL, Salesforce, Sitecore, Mongo, Couch, Oracle, etc.)
• Invented a percussion-to-melody machine that surfaces hidden layers in sound for live performance & installation (PD, C, Lua, math, custom hardware, synthesizers), exhibited with Creative Music Guild
• Invented an interactive real-time engine for music visualization rooted in neurological principles of multi-modal perception, philosophically informed, research-driven, pleasure-seeking (VVVV, VL, HLSL, C++, oF, C#, SPSS, hardware)
• Built Twitter bots using natural language processing to spread positivity (GCP, NLTK)
• Developed circuits and embedded systems in educational electronics projects to teach principles of engineering, robotics and physics (C, asm, GTK+, VB, Eagle)
• Founded lazerbea.ms, an independent multimedia label centering on retrieving human intent in interactions with and production of media, challenging design conventions, and exploring possibilities of cybernetic expressionism
• Exploring questions of synthetic acceleration of art practice in ongoing book-length work: “Magical Realism Products: Towards an Ontology of Generative Art”

...AS TECHNICAL DIRECTOR for ANALOGFOLK, 2017-2019

My most recent directorial project built upon Nike web infrastructure and its myriad internal systems, and I have not only developed on those platforms, but moreover shaped their design. I strategically worked to align technical, creative and brand goals to successfully deploy an experience that pushes boundaries. I fostered connections between Nike's technical teams, 3rd party vendors, internal strategy and content production; instigated conversations that led to true inter-department collaboration, and did it all on ambitious timelines. My key to accomplishing this is a genuine love of collaboration, distilling esoteric technical considerations into actionable business decisions, and constant empathy for the user, who ultimately determines the success of any product.

“One of the best Technical Leads/Developer/Geniuses I've ever worked with... I'd move mountains to work with him again!” -Megan Hughes, Director of Production

• Led discovery phases, performed research on target user segments, assisted development of personas, asked why? a lot
• Led implementation of product for the above personas, working to ensure consistency in presentation and function
• Estimated, prioritized delivery of features, established a nimble phased approach incorporating frequent audience touch-points, client KPIs and data-driven learnings into feature strategy
• Built prototypes, ideated feature-sets, rapidly iterated concepts for products as varied as Tinder-themed presentations, virtual communities for professional trainers, SMS-based social justice chatbots and open-source advocacy platforms
• (Did the above using various tech including python, ruby, Django, Node, JS, React, Docker, Jenkins, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Atlassian, etc.)
• Scoped solutions, developed roadmaps, evaluated feasibility, assessed technical resources, audited development processes, established best practices
• Oversaw complex 3rd party integrations into critical internal systems, aligned client stakeholders, defined deliverables
• Collaborated with clients' internal technical teams to shape the next generations of their platforms with a focus on extensibility
• Created multiple levels of documentation and playbooks for various audiences, from executive to creative to technical
• Presented all of the above to current and prospective clients as well as internal leadership
• Lots of slides

...AS TECHNOLOGY LEAD for SWIFT AGENCY, 2015-2017

I worked full-time at Swift for two years. My title was technology lead. In practice, this meant full-stack technical architect and creative technologist (and sometimes director, producer...) I scoped, engineered, built, documented, tested, planned, resourced and managed Agile teams building enterprise solutions for clients including Starbucks, Goodnes (Nestlé), Hot Pockets and Outrigger. When things hit, I was the 10x polyglot that worked it out. I advocated foremost for the user, and deepened the integration of UX into the design and development processes, supporting user research and testing. I encouraged collaboration and broke down silos, and oversaw the implementation of the first truly Agile process in Swift's (and our client's) history, which became a measure of success for future projects.

“Michael exceeds expectations consistently. There are seemingly no programmatic hurdles that Michael is not capable of jumping. More than that, Michael is uniquely gifted at understanding challenges and analyzing gaps and subsequently assisting a team in finding the right solution. If brick and mortar were his medium, his output would not just be buildings, but buildings that are crafted with precision and aesthetics blending into art. You will enjoy working with Michael and will be exceedingly satisfied with the creative technology that results from his work.”
-Josh McKenney, Technical Director

• Led discovery, development, ongoing feature assessment for Goodnes, a recipe site and lifestyle web app from Nestlé
• Partnered with UX and strategy to develop personas, assess outcomes and explore features through technical and audience research, interviews
• Partnered with client to instigate Agile practices in an environment that had only ever known waterfall, increasing transparency and sharing ownership amongst teams. Established best practices for ideation, development and promotion. Established a Continuous Integration pipeline within the strictures of the Nestlé ecosystem
• Wrote requirements, established Definitions of Done, estimated tickets and created sprints, stories, epics
• Performed in-depth technical audit, surfaced technical debt and proposed incremental, corrective measures that fit with campaign timelines, developer resources and budget. Prioritized high-value strategic wins
• Assessed 3rd party integrations for usefulness, value and technical function
• Led complex integrations via an internationally distributed development team
• Implemented test-driven development using tools including Selenium and xUnit
• Assessed developer and UX candidates, performed regular check-ins to set goals, evaluate progress and performance
• Led complete web rebrand for Hot Pockets, yes Hot Pockets. Collaborated closely with UX and design to surprise, delight and gamify. Ideated on creative strategy. Formed and led a hybrid local-remote development team, kept sprints on track.
• Expanded back-end capabilities of Umbraco to bring performance-enhancing features, robust analytics and internationalization to a platform with none of those things. ¡Hot Pockets en español!
• Encapsulated these features into reusable .NET packages, and implemented them across other Nestlé CPG sites, such as stouffers.com
• Architected, led development of the Angular-based front-end of hotpockets.com and the Hot Pocket discovery tool
• Contributed to social platform strategy, and integrated Tumblr seamlessly into the hotpockets.com front-end experience in a way that reflected audience expectations and ongoing campaign positioning
• Expanded Swift's internal, atomic front-end development kit (via PatternLab and Gulp) to enable greater parallel development and collaboration
• Developed and led the development of front-end components for complete redesign of outrigger.com, Outrigger Hotels & Resorts' web presence
• Integrated front-end components within a complex configuration of SiteCore CMS
• Audited, oversaw and led accessibility efforts, ensuring WCAG 2.0 compliance and establishing standards to make accessibility a priority
• Established code style standards across a variety of languages

Later, as a consulting creative technologist in 2018, I helped teams including Google's Made With Code and YouTube Music light things up across social media, focusing on UX, storytelling and emotional design.

• Designed, engineered and fabricated props for Google's Made With Code STEM campaign, using Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, metal 3d printing, conductive ink pens, and custom LED arrays.
• Created microsites for YouTube Music artists, Starbucks campaigns, and more, integrating real-time social media monitoring (via Twitter and other APIs, running on python microservices) into custom dashboards for real-time campaign operations

...AS INTERACTIVE DEVELOPER for HARRISON & STAR, 2010-2015

Prior to goin' out west, I was a first-call lead interactive developer working within the NYC health care/pharma communications industry. I developed there a reputation for being the rare human who is creative, diligent, fun to work with, adaptable, humble, knowledgeable, open, always willing to both teach and learn, and able to do all of this under the pressure and regulatory constraints of pharma -- in the words of one former colleague, “such a mensch.”

• Designed and developed elaborate 2d and 3d animations, interactive data visualization and sales presentations for uiWebView-based iPad apps using CSS, ThreeJS, Unity, D3, SASS, Greensock, SVG and lots more.
• Designed and built portable, scalable analytics collection systems for multiple platforms (as suites of highly redundant failover .NET services paired with both embedded NoSQL and centralized MSSQL)
• Integrated those systems into front end products, including websites, installations (Unity, Flash) and iPad apps
• Analyzed and presented collected data to identify usage patterns and drive engagement. Created dashboard for others to do the same.
• Architected, developed and designed friendly single-page application for a medical studies database (.NET, Knockout, D3)
• Architected and developed countless websites utilizing C# .NET, Drupal, WordPress as well as proprietary Java platforms. Developed re-usable and mobile-friendly solutions and plugins. Strong full-stack focus across several stacks.
• Drove adoption of new technologies and best practices, introduced automation and preprocessing workflows, closely collaborated with developers and department stakeholders to improve work handoff, collaboration and approval pipeline

...AS A SELECTED WORD CLOUD of FEATURES

1. .NET
2. 3d
3. accessibility
4. Agile
5. Angular
6. APIs
7. audio
8. AWS
9. Azure
10. Bash
11. biofeedback
12. 'bots
13. C
14. C#
15. C++
16. Cinder
17. CSS
18. creative ideation
19. client relations
20. cognitive psychology
21. collaboration
22. dev-ops
23. design thinking
24. discovery
25. Drupal
26. ECMAScript
27. electrical engineering
28. emotional design
29. full-stack architecture
30. Git
31. Google Cloud
32. Gulp
33. HTML5
34. IIS
35. interactivity
36. JS
37. LAMP
38. LINQ
39. Linux
40. Lua
41. "making it scale"
42. ML
43. MSSQL
44. MVC
45. MySQL
46. NLP
47. Node
48. NoSQL
49. OOP
50. openFrameworks
51. OpenGL
52. patience
53. Perl
54. PS
55. PHP
56. Processing
57. product design
58. prototyping
59. Python
60. research & discovery
61. REST
62. scrum
63. SiteCore
64. Selenium
65. strategy
66. Umbraco
67. Unity
68. UX
69. VVVV
70. WCAG
71. webpack
72. words (using)
73. WP
74. Φ