Chief Technology Officer at The Fantasy Network Corporation (2016 - 2021)

by Hawke Robinson — published Jul 31, 2020 10:45 AM, last modified Apr 26, 2023 08:32 PM

Technology and business consultant as volunteer Chief Technology Officer. Helped ZOE, TFN, GenCon, WorldCon, and others.

Working directly with CEO, as consultant, architect, project manager, and acting Chief Technology Officer, helped him scope out vision, and I created initially in-my-own-home working prototypes and live streaming media and community platform, which would later be setup at collocation facilities. Under my leadership, versions 1.x through 3.x of the TFN Community & Movie Streaming Platform were bug-free releases. Part-time volunteer as acting CTO, on and off as needed October 2016 through August 2021.

Asked to come back and help April 2020 to help them in crisis to massively extend TFN 4.x to become a full convention event platform working by July 2020, to support many smaller conventions, and the much larger WorldCon / CoNZealand. Finished final launch phase on nearly impossibly tight schedule with many added features.

The project during my absence became an incredibly chaotic, unmanaged, undocumented mess, with half a dozen chiefs stepping all over each other. The project was doomed to fail.

It was very challenging herding all these strong-willed "cats", but in strong partnership with the CEO, was able to step by step bring some order to the chaos, begin getting documentation developed, setup development and staging environments (they were previously doing most development on production environment!), get some process, revision control, and issue tracking in place.

Brought in, and directly managed on a daily basis, multiple off-shore teams from India to help speed up the process to get across the finish line successfully with only weeks of time.

It was a real nail-biter, at first far more chaotic than almost any other project I have seen (and I've seen many).

While there were many challenges, I was finally able to get the project back on schedule and deliver the critical final stage on schedule.

After that the CEO ended up helping save CoNZealand from themselves by replacing their mess of a Wordpress setup (we had no involvement with up to that point), with the TFN environment, and saved the day, allowing the Hugo Awards to be able to take place online for the first time since their inception 78 years ago!

In developing the architecture for TFN 1+, I personally evaluated, installed, configured, cobbled together, and prototype tested over 80 technologies, eventually whittled down to 6 core technologies and other supporting products.

This platform has then been revised each year for each version of the platform.

As of July/August 2020, we are now working on wrapping up version 4.5.x

Technologies include but not limited to:
* Gluu, SSO, OAuth, OpenID, Passport, SAML, SCIM, etc.
* Odoo / OpenRPG
* Discord Integration, Application, & Bot development.
* Grenadine
* Wordpress
* Ubuntu Linux
* CentOS Linux
* DNS
* Uscreen
* Patreon integration
* Plone
* Apache
* Nginx
* MediaWiki
* Gumroad
* Zoom integration
* Jitsi integration

Collaborated with many third parties, vendors, VARs, streams providers, software developers, project managers, clients, also multiple off-shore services (India).

Scoping for TFN 5.0 began August/September 2020.

I left the organization August 2021 after several months of transitioning. I left because the original founder/CEO that I joined to help, had moved on.