Eric Buchanan

28 Days of Fantasy was Yahoo's most ambitious mobile campaign with 23 features shipped across iOS, Android, and web over 28 consecutive days leading into the 2025 football season, coordinated across 60 engineers. Every day had a deliverable. Every day had a deadline. There was no margin for error.

I oversaw all client-side engineering teams across iOS and Android, ensuring features were built, tested, and ready to ship on schedule—day after day. I created the dashboards that gave the team real-time visibility into progress, authored the runbooks and DEFCON rubrics that defined how we responded when things went wrong, and wrote the full launch plan that mapped out exactly what happened, on which platform, at what time, across all 28 days. When blockers surfaced, I removed them. When the scope threatened the timeline, I made the call. When the team needed direction, I provided it. Sixty engineers, 23 features, 28 days—all delivered.

Daily Draw is a free-to-play prediction game I helped ship inside the Yahoo Sports app—going from napkin to production in just 85 days. Each day, fans receive a randomly generated pack of six cards tied to the biggest sporting event of the day, select four predictions, and compete on a leaderboard for cash prizes. The game became one of Yahoo Sports' most engaging features.

As client-side engineering lead, I bridged the gap between incomplete product specs and a hard launch deadline. I wrote engineering specifications to unblock both back-end and client teams, built dashboards to track progress in real time, and worked hands-on to remove blockers as they surfaced. When the scope threatened the timeline, I negotiated compromises with the product team to protect the delivery date without sacrificing the core experience. I also authored the runbooks, DEFCON rubrics, and the full launch plan—ensuring the team was prepared for every scenario on launch day. Equal parts engineer, project manager, and Scrum Master, I kept the team moving when it mattered most.

Yahoo's mobile observability stack was running on an internally forked version of Sentry 6, 3-4 years behind the current open-source release. Engineers flagged it in a retrospective: the UI was painful, tooling was slow, and the team was losing time they couldn't afford. I took ownership of the problem and led a solo evaluation of three paths forward: licensing Sentry SaaS, continuing to invest in the in-house fork, or adopting Embrace SDK.

The technical decision was straightforward. Getting it approved was not. Over nearly two years, I navigated legal, data privacy, cybersecurity, and financial approval processes—presenting to multiple engineering councils and Fantasy leadership to build the case at every level. When Embrace was finally approved and deployed, the impact was immediate and broad. Mobile engineers across all of Yahoo could find bugs faster, receive alerts sooner, and build proactive dashboards to catch issues before users ever saw them. One retrospective comment became a 2-year mission that improved the daily workflow for every mobile engineer at Yahoo.

Yahoo Fantasy and Yahoo Sports had grown into two separate mobile codebases over 15+ years—tens of thousands of lines of code across iOS and Android, maintained by roughly 40 engineers. As I mapped out the engineering work needed for 28 Days of Fantasy, it became clear that features like Daily Draw, Reactions, Comments, and Megafeeds all needed to live in both apps. Building and maintaining them twice wasn't sustainable. I made the call to move to a monorepo.

The real challenge wasn't the architecture—it was the timing. We executed the migration in-flight, in the middle of active development toward a hard football season deadline, without slowing the team down. Two to three months of planning, one month to execute, and two weeks to shake out the bugs. When it was done, engineers could move fluidly between apps, shared code was written once and deployed everywhere, and cross-app features required 20% less engineering effort. What started as a practical observation about code sharing became a foundational architectural decision that changed how Yahoo's mobile teams worked.

I architected and built the core audio player powering Samsung Milk Music's signature fast station switching—the feature that set it apart from Pandora and every other streaming radio app at the time. By pre-caching audio at the station level, the player delivered instant music playback as users spun the app's iconic dial through 200+ stations and 13 million songs. The seamless, haptic-driven dial experience only worked because the audio layer beneath it was fast, reliable, and invisible to the user—that was my responsibility.

Beyond audio engineering, I helped lead the mobile development team, served as a technical project manager, and acted as a scrum master—keeping a complex, multidisciplinary team aligned and on schedule. The result was a March 2014 launch that made an immediate impact. Within 4 months, Milk Music surpassed 2 million downloads and became one of the most talked-about music apps of the year. The project went on to win a Platinum A' Design Award, one of the most prestigious recognitions in product design, along with a W3 Award and a US Mobile and App Design Award.

At mSpot, expanding into 3D movie streaming required a DRM solution that could support double the resolution our existing licensing agreements covered. Licensing an off-the-shelf solution wasn't cost-effective, so I built one instead.

The core innovation was a shift in how device integrity was determined. Rather than making the security decision on-device—where it could be compromised—I designed a system that ran a series of device-integrity tests and returned the results to a back-end server for processing. The server made the trust decision, not the device. I built the end-to-end proof of concept solo, then partnered with a back-end engineer to productize it. The approach was novel enough to earn two US patents: US8793793 and US8863310.

The impact was immediate and historic. Two major studios granted conditional approval to begin streaming 3D movies, making mSpot's white-label app on AT&T the first in the US to stream 3D movies on mobile. What started as a cost-saving decision became a patented security architecture that opened an entirely new content category.