Rocco Balsamo

Freelance Software Engineer, Web Applications · San Francisco, CA · Email ℝoccob@gmail.com

I'm an expert full-stack web engineer. I generally focus on front-end technologies and graphics for the web.

I'm the founder of SIMMER.io, a website for sharing WebGL games and I also teach online courses on Udemy. I've been developing software professionally for over 15 years.

As of December 2017, I'm actively looking for freelance engineering work. I specialize in front-end web development in a variety of Javascript frameworks.

Contact Me

Recent Accomplishments

  • Built SIMMER.io from scratch, a full stack web application for sharing WebGL games.
  • Published two video courses teaching about Google Chrome Developer Tools. The free beginner class has nearly 10,000 students and the advanced course has earned the "Bestseller" badge on Udemy.
  • Gave technical talks at ForwardJS, SFHTML5 Meetup, Unity Unite and the SFHTML5 Developers Conference, mostly about graphics for the web.
  • Volunteered for a semester at Mission Bit, helping teach San Francisco public high school kids how to write code.
  • Wrote numerous technical articles on Medium, Hackernoon, Dev.to, and various corporate blogs.

Wall o' Acronyms

Every good developer has a wall of acronyms on their resume. Here's mine:

HTML5, CSS, Javascript, Vue.js, Vuex, Backbone.js, Ember.js, Node.js, Underscore, Lodash, ES6, ES2016, Webpack, Browserify, Gulp, Grunt, Git, Github, Bitbucket, NPM, JQuery, SCSS, Bootstrap, AWS, S3, EC2, Lambda, Firebase, Google Cloud Functions, Serverless Framework, WebRTC, Vuetify, Bulma, C/C++, WebGL, Unity3D, C#, Agile, Scrum, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Java, PHP, Perl.

...and a wee bit of React and React Native

Freelancing & Entrepreneurship

As of December 2017, I'm accepting freelance engineering work. I generally specialize in front-end web development and graphics. Contact me.

SIMMER.io

San Francisco, CA

SIMMER.io is a place for sharing WebGL games online, and is my first crack at online entrepeneurship. I've built a drag and drop system for sharing games made with the Unity game engine. Over 100 games have been shared by game developers in the first two months after launch.

I've made sharing games easy on sites like Patreon, Kickstarter, Wix, Medium and Wordpress. The site was made with VueJS, Vuetify, Firebase, and Google Cloud functions.

2017

Brandly

Woodside, CA

Brandly provides the simplest way for businesses to order high quality branded products online. I helped modernize Brandly's frontend architecture by rapidly converting it from Angular 2 to VueJS.

2017

Fonteco

San Diego, CA

Fonteco is a company that does social media photo sharing and photo booth rentals. I built several custom Web applications for displaying photos and caricatures created and shared during conferences and events.

2017

Web Development

TINT

Senior Software Engineer · San Francisco, CA

TINT is a web app for sharing user generated content from various data sources like Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.

I worked on the editor and viewer and built various display themes for TINT, which was mostly developed in Backbone.js. I added major site optimizations like prerendering content, and I helped get the team up to speed on agile practices. I contributed to company culture by running many technical and non-technical "skill share" sessions and also ran a few hack days.

I also was a member of the UI Squad where we designed and implemented UI/UX improvements to the TINT interface.

2015 - 2017

Gliffy

Senior Software Engineer · San Francisco, CA

Gliffy is a company that makes online diagramming software.

For the first year, I worked on team of four developing the core product, an online diagram editor. I built features like line routing, shape scaling, grouping, themes and layers using graphics skills that I acquired in the games industry. Later I worked on integrations with other products like JIRA and Confluence.

I ran some technical brown bag sessions, and company-wide "Innovation Days"--three days every quarter dedicated to hacking and prizes. I also planned weekly company lunches.

2012 - 2015

Moblyng

Software Engineer · Redwood City, CA

Moblyng was an HTML5 games company. I was the lead engineer on a few small games that played in the web browser, Facebook, iOS and Android using modern (at the time) frameworks like JQuery and PhoneGap (now Cordova). I mostly worked in Javascript but dabbled in PHP, Java and Objective C for certain tasks.

2011

Game Development

Note: I'm generally a web developer these days, but I worked in the games industry during the first half of my career.

Backbone Entertainment

Software Engineer · Emeryville, CA

Backbone Entertainment was a console games company where I worked on games for a variety of systems including PSP, PS3, Wii and Nintendo DS.

I developed on over ten titles including three Rock Band games and Death Jr., a game about the son of the Grim Reaper. Programming was mostly in C++ on a proprietary engine and I worked on everything from high level gameplay and controls to low level memory management and networking.

2005 - 2010

ImaginEngine

Software Engineer · Framingham, MA

ImaginEngine was a company that specialized in CD-ROM games for children. I was a C++ gameplay programmer for glorious titles like Care Bears, Let's Have a Ball and Disney Preschool Time Online.

2004 - 2005

Maxis / EA

Software Engineering Intern · Walnut Creek, CA

I worked on performance monitoring tools (and the cheat code window!) for The Sims 2 as an intern at Maxis.

2001

Back in college, I also did web development internships at NEC Research Institute (wrote a perl search engine) and the Hillier Group (Java Applets!) in Princeton, NJ.

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Master of Science
Computer Science
2003

Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute

Bachelor of Science, Cum Laude

Computer Science

Electronic Media, Arts and Communication

1999-2003

I also attended MBA track courses at Framingham State University in 2004