From 2015 to 2019 I was Senior Technical Lead at MyPhoto and Polaroid Fotobar in Boca Raton, Florida. The company turns customers' photos into custom photo products, which means the whole business starts with one action: a customer getting a photo onto the website.
The upload problem
For most ecommerce sites, the hard part is checkout. For a photo products company, it is the upload. If moving a photo from a phone or computer onto the site feels like work, people quit before they ever see their picture on a product. Every bit of friction in that one step costs orders.
A lot of my work went into that step. I improved the user interface of the MyPhoto website to simplify the photo upload process, so customers could get from "here is a photo I love" to designing a product with as little in the way as possible.
The patent
That work produced something I am proud of. I co-invented a patented technique for streamlining the way customers upload their photos, published as US-20140053081-A1. A patent does not change your day to day as a developer, but it is a formal record that the approach we built was new. The filing lists me under my full name, Nathanael F. Pelton.
The production side
A smooth upload only matters if the order behind it gets made. I developed tools for the production warehouse that let the team manage orders all the way through the manufacturing process, so nothing depended on someone remembering where a given order stood.
MyPhoto was also not an online-only operation. The company ran physical stores in South Florida and Las Vegas alongside the website, and I worked on adapting the site to support both, so the same platform served customers whether they ordered from their couch or walked into a store.
The lesson I kept from those years is that the easiest-looking part of a product is usually where the real engineering went. Nobody who uploads a photo in a few seconds thinks about what made that possible, and that is the point.
More of my work is on the projects page, and if you have questions about any of it, get in touch.