Andrey Tarantsov

Delivered a number of MVPs for USA Today Network, exploring various aspects of the future of digital journalism. These spanned across our system (native apps, mobile web, and desktop web) and involved predictive analytics, natural language processing, and large-scale data processing.

Music playback and exploration app for a major mixtapes publisher. Consistently loved by hundreds of thousands of active users.

I developed this app from scratch, with an advanced caching and offline playback system inside. A good amount of effort went into protecting our early releases from automated extraction.

See Employment section for more details.

A simple companion app to LiveMixtapes, originally built by a different developer and later rebuilt by myself due to stability and code quality issues with the original version.

Selected review:
Best radio app for hip hop ★★★★★
Works better than ever would love to see new features though. Keep up the good work! Nice update!

An experiment for the Innovation & Product Development Department at Michigan.com. A bot that predicts popular articles, renders speed-reading videos for them and posts those to Twitter and Facebook. Has helped dramatically increase the number of visitors to DetroitNow.io, another MVP of our lab.

A Chrome extension that replaces the New tab with a highly visual gallery of the latest articles in Michigan publications. An MVP built for Innovation & Product Development Department at Michigan.com.

An internal presentation app for a luxury residences provider, used to demo the residences and available amenities to potential buyers, as well as presenting the company's overall portfolio.

Goal: Help salespeople win customers by providing an iPad app that projects a lot of pretty images and compelling information on an external display.

1. Built a highly visual iPad app according to the design specs.
2. The app can project the same UI, adjusted for a different aspect ratio, on an external display or via AirPlay.
3. Implemented syncing for user data; provided specs and example server-side implementation of the syncing API.
4. Imported and cleaned up a lot of existing data from Excel documents and from WordPress data exported from their web site.

(I've also built several apps very similar to this one, as a subcontractor for the same company.)

An app for web developers that automatically refreshes the browser and makes Sass, LESS, CoffeeScript, and other compilers accessible and convenient for all users.

Held a Top 10 paid developer app in the Mac App Store for the majority of the first three years.

Featured in Smashing Magazine, CSS Tricks blog, Adobe product blog and multiple presentations by Google Chrome developer relations team. Thousands of happy customers, dozens of raving reviews.

A companion to my LiveReload app, these extensions are also being used by numerous open-source tools, including those produced by Google. The Chrome extension has over 200,000 active users.

Spanish/French/German/Italian/Portuguese-English dictionaries for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Blackberry and Mac. Normally the apps hold a top 5 keyword search position on iOS, #1 position on Android. Repeatedly named the best Android dictionary app.

Goal: grow a dictionary app business.

1. Took over the development of an existing iOS app, and brought the product to Android, Windows Phone 8 and Mac platforms.
2. Implemented a number of most-requested features, making the most out of the databases the company has.
3. Enabled a team of linguists to continuously update the dictionaries via a dedicated portal and a supporting Chrome extension.

I still provide occasional mentoring for this client's development team.

Valet service automation suite, allowing residents to request their car from the valets, and to communicate with concierge and valet services.

Goal: help the client explore feasibility of mobile apps for automation of everyday flows.

1. Worked with a designer to make the best possible and Apple Human Interface Guidelines-compliant screen designs.
2. Delivered an iPhone app for residents, an iPad app for staff, an API for the apps, and an admin web portal.

An interactive presentation app for potential investors of New York Presbyterian Hospital. (Hired by a 3D modeling agency to build an app for their client.) A particular challenge has been to reuse the design elements across a large number of similar, but subtly different screens. For that, I've created a custom layout engine that rendered layouts, behaviors, animations, media, and copy based on an easy-to-edit declarative format. I built the engine and the app in under 1.5 months. The app has ultimately been delivered to the customer of the agency on a set of dedicated iPads.

Goals: (1) rapidly accommodate changes based on the customer’s feedback, (2) provide a maintainable solution for exposing a vast amount of data through the app.

Has been the #1 free entertainment app in Japan for several months in 2011, with 
250,000 downloads in the first month.

Goal: advertise a plastic surgery clinic.

Built an app simulating three kinds of face surgeries the clinic does: nose width adjustment, chin width adjustment, and addition of a “double eyelid.”

A high-fidelity iOS prototyping tool that I founded in 2010. Works in-browser, built with HTML5 and some jQuery.

I had a co-founder, but he did very little actual coding, so 95% has been built by me. It's a solid prototype which is still being used by a few people, but after the other co-founder left, I didn't have the energy to turn it into a real product.

An iOS app for cafe/restaurant staff to manage customer reservations and live waiting lists.

Goal: quickly implement a visually attractive prototype of a startup idea.

1. Turned a bunch of design screens into a working prototype.
2. Together with a client, did multiple iterations on screen layouts and behavior, successfully hitting numerous tight deadlines to demo stuff at prescheduled investor meetings.

The customer went on to demo the app to multiple potential clients and investors.