Hi! I'm Carlo Francisco.

"The journey itself is my home." - Bashō

About Me

I'm a software engineer who lives in Chicago. I write code in Ruby and JavaScript. I'm an advocate of technologies like Ruby on Rails, Backbone.js, Node.js, and Git.

I believe in the power of collaboration and pair programming in small, Agile, focused teams. I'm madly in love with GitHub Flow.

When I'm not building stuff, I like reading culture and political blogs, listening to rap music, taking photos, brewing and discovering beer, riding my bike, and watching good television.

Things I've worked on at Groupon

Getaways

I helped launch the first iteration of Groupon's Getaways travel deals. We built a fast landing page that displays a grid of deals and a specialized deal page. I also did work on a variety of A/B experiments we ran on both pages.

My team and I launched Groupon's Goods product deals. This was the same team that successfully collaborated on Getaways. Groupon Goods has since grown to be one of the company's main revenue drivers, generating $1.5-billion in annual global billings.

VIP

I helped build a paginated gallery of deals accessible to members of Groupon's VIP program.

Occasions

Beginning with 2011's Grouponicus holiday promotion, we implemented a gallery that displays a new set of promoted deals every week. Part of the challenge in building the Occasions page was making sure that all related assets could be easily swapped out according to a time-based configuration file.

Widgets

My team and I built a number of configurable widgets that pulled deals from a variety of services and data stores, allowing us to display deals in groupings like similar deals and recently viewed deals. Writing these widgets as Backbone.js views allowed us to drop them anywhere on the site. We later built a dedicated Rails 3 service to render these widgets.

Gifting

For the 2012 holiday season, I helped build a page that served up deals Groupon recommended to buy as gifts. We also built a Backbone.js-powered "Gift Finder" widget that allows users to search for personalized giftable deals.

Things I've worked on elsewhere

Lookbook Browser

I wrote a simple iPhone app that lets users of the fashion community website lookbook.nu browse through photos on the site. I was dissatisfied with how the mobile site was laid out and found out that no one had made a native iOS app yet.

WeScam

To learn Rails, I built a matchmaking site for my graduating class at my alma mater, Wesleyan University. Writing WeScam gave me the opportunity to develop an entire full stack web app from start to finish.

Billiards

I spent some time hacking on an iOS billiards app with my colleague Vernon Thommeret. The game's a work-in-progress.

Etsy Bazaar

I wanted to write a web app for the Etsy Handmade Code contest, and came up with a neat and easy to use visual search page for people who shop on Etsy. It was my first attempt at any sort of front-end development.

Wesleying

Wesleying is my alma mater's unofficial student blog. As the site's web administrator I implemented features requested by the Wesleying team and hacked on ways to make the site faster.

The New Confusion

In 2010, a friend of mine wanted his site transferred off Blogspot, so I redesigned the blog for him and moved everything to Wordpress.

Digital Animation

I worked on an animation project for a class called Animation in the Digital Age. I used modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering techniques in Maya to superimpose CGI over match-moved camera footage. Watch it here.