Match.com / 2011-2012
I left Blockdot in 2011 because I got an intriguing offer to ply my trade at Match.com. There I worked with a few of my close college friends and a diverse team of extraordinary professionals.
It was an interesting experience for sure. I took the position because I rather liked the idea of instant brand recognition that would flash across people's faces when I told them what I did. What I didn't expect was the sheer volume of stories I would hear from people I'd never met about how Match.com changed their lives for the better.
Feels good :)
Technically, Match.com is a behemoth. It's an old DotCom bubble enterprise that's had a TON of features piled on an aging architecture and still managed to hold it's weight. The team I worked with implemented yet more features such as a private member to member phone book for people to exchange numbers in a safe and secure way, and several re-implementations in .NET for existing ASP site features like navigation, profile views, etc.
If it doesn't sound glamorous that's because it wasn't. Most of the time I worked on fixing ancient bugs, emailing back and forth with QA and pairing up with a systems dev to implement the occasional new feature. That's not to say it was boring; far from it. It was at Match.com that I started to really zero in on the discipline of Front-End Engineering as a specialization; which I've furthered to this day.
match.com circa 2016