About Eric

Starting in St. Louis, I dropped out of my Chemistry major to work on developing websites. A librarian at UMSL turned me on to Perl and UNIX. This was 1994 when everyone wanted a website, but didn't really know why, they just knew they had to have one.  

This led to years of consulting/contract programming work and the realization that I really didn't want to be a web designer. One client's quote that ended it all, "Can we have that background be hunter green?"

I moved into more programming, Visual Basic and Java. I learned early on how to make the best of tools.  I didn't know VB so I taught myself. The client need a Mac version of the PC software I wrote in VB, so I didn't learn Java then, I found a tool that converted VB code into a Java app and then I adapted that app to run on the Mac.  

Then everything changed when I got a full time job, with an affiliate marketing startup.  I build a team and we built their custom CRM, Email Marketing, Website platform for 25 ecom websites, credit cart fraud prevention, and a globally redundant system for keeping a 99.999 (only 3 nines) uptime on our affiliate platform and website. This was pre cloud days when we had to manage this across multiple data centers, Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, Singapore and even the Bahamas.  I ended up being called CTO.

The first analytics pixel I put on a website, was one I designed.  Processing log files with Urchin on 25 sites was a pretty bad plan vs a real time data stream. This later led to my working for another startup that was building ecom website optimization software.  I highly optimized their performance and built an addition that could use near real time weather forecasts to control what content was presented to any given website visitor depending on their location.

That led to my working for ELC Online. They are the department of Estee Lauder that manage their online platform across all of Estee Lauder's brands.  There I built a custom tag management system and worked with IBM Coremetrics at a very large scale.  Later I was the technical lead on ELC's move to Adobe Analytics and several other major global migrations, the last one being their move to the Google 360 platform.  Outside of Marketing Technology I helped them start a major move towards building their website platform on Drupal and lead the team that build the first version of that for Smashbox.