H3S1: Upwork intro:
<X.ref-Upwork,a.r>: I bring 2 primary expertise to Upwork: WordPress web development, and academic-quality technical writing. These expertise are tangential, but also related: my development of WordPress is backed by a deep knowledge in technical documentation, both of WordPress, and of PHP(personal-dash, project below), as well as tangential technologies, MySQL, HTML5, CSS, and JS, all of which, are components of WordPress’s open-sourced codebase. This does not mean that I’m slow, but rather, that what I build, is coherent with how Automattic, the largest stakeholder in the WordPress ecosystem, w/ nearly $1-bn in venture funding, according to Crunchbase, thinks about WordPress.
Automattic is the developer of WP-core, WooCommerce, Gutenberg, and will remain a key player, for the foreseeable decades, of this part of the web. Building in coherence with their corporate direction, as well as the direction of PHP group, the maintainers of the open sourced PHP programming language, upon which WordPress, and nearly 80% of the known web, maximizes the chances that our resulting code will be 1) scalable, to many millions of users, 2) compatible with the maximal number of future technologies, 3) perform well, for our business needs.
Previously, my ability to lead a large web development project was validated, in my tenure, as the CEO/CTO of Distractify.com, at which time, I built and maintained a team of over 20 LAMP-stack developers, based remotely, and wrote one of the fastest websites on the internet, which grew to over 50 million unique visitors in April 2014, earning us one of the splashiest Series-A funding rounds that year, led by Jeremy Liew, the first institutional investor of Snapchat, at Lightspeed VC, Ken Lerer, the founder of Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, as well as execs, and ex-execs, and CBS Viacom, the Creative Arts Agency, AOL, and I even turned down a direct offer from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, whom I met personally, in San Francisco, at the headquarters of Edmodo, one of his investments. Distractify remains a successful company, 10 years later, although I’m no longer actively involved, nor do I possess the cash from the acquisition event that bought out my shares, the website still runs the exact LAMP-stack codebase that I architected, and its speed, and reliability, have endured over the years, in an ecosystem where frameworks and libraries come and go, like the tides on the beach.
As a technical author, and provider of documentation, I am the author of the longest book in the history of chess, a field that has published since Luis Ramírez de Lucena’s Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez con Juegos de Partido, published in Salamanca around 1497, by a margin of over 400,000 words. The book, in its entirety, can be accessed, from Upwork, via the project link in the Material in Chess project below, and this should be worth, in itself, the cost of your time, in visiting my profile. In authoring this book, I produced 1) literature reviews in over 10 STEM fields, including visual systems neuroscience, 2) contemporary research in quantum computing(ch-15), 3) linguistics, the universal grammar, and the genetic component of language development(Pinker, Chomsky, ch-8), 4) the Solvay conference series, which produced several Nobel Prizes in physics, in connection with the Carlsbad series of chess tournaments, from 1907-1929(ch-17), 5) magnetism, superconductivity, and other pseudo quantum-effects that are hot-spots for industrial research #
Moreover, I produced a scientific research proposal, for Taylor and Francis, based on my reading of Alfred Binet(1994) and Eliot Hearst(2008), which you can view in the IQ research portfolio project. In my writing, I take into consideration, my WordPress development capabilities, in that I’m able to design a well-formatted page, upon which technical words can be easily perceived by the end-reader, and I think of my authorship, not only as content, but as a product, making the citations flow seamlessly into the text, and keeping users engaged. In line with the product development angle, I also have experience with 50+ hours of academic-quality lecture video production, based on the book, which is also available, in various portfolio samples below.
In addition to chess and STEM research, I’ve also created several libraries of documentation for WordPress development, and PHP development 1) in connection with MySQL, with which PHP has quite a few contact points 2) multi-threading w/ HTML, 3) and connections with WebSockets, HTTP, and other base web protocols, in order to expand the applicability of PHP. Despite the recent trends, I’m still a firm believer of the viability of the LAMP-stack, as the continued basis, for server-side programming, on the web, and this is well-supported by my research, as well as those of my collaborators. For all of my web development projects, I also provide ample documentation, so that you can support your own projects, going forward.
H3S2: Media coverage<2009-present>:
H3S3: Academic credentials:
H3S4: Total impact assessment<fbno>:
H3S5: My academic and industrial line of descent<nice!>:
H3S6: Spiritual Gifts<LDS>:
Hu: The presentation of this section, for professional purposes, is in alignment with my Christian faith, as supported by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<a-r>:
H3S7: Employment history:
H4S1<reverse-chron>: Personal-dash:
WAMP-stack PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS project, with very light JS integration, and no external frameworks or dependencies. Personal-dash is a private bookmarks manager<see-portfolio> with unlimited layers of depth, and allow users to take notes, on a page basis. Bookmark pages, as a webpage, can then be shared with other users, providing a directory to a link stack, such as for company onboarding. Implementation details: 1) wrote MySQL UPDATE, SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE queries, in PHP 2) used for and while loops to populate HTML tables<Turing> 3) used PHP conditional controllers to moderate the display of HTML elements, such as menu items 4) used $_SESSION, $_GET, and $_POST super-globals, to control PHP conditionals, such as by checking the $_SESSION user, against post author.
H4S2: Chess University:
Launched a non-accredited education startup, Chess University, that produces novel research in STEM, trains instructors, and provides training products to students of all ages. In 2021, we sold $8,000 in group lesson packages, in coordination with Nerdy Inc’s venture, Varsity Tutors. In 2022, we published the lengthiest chess non-fiction book of all time, co-authored by Yakun Hu, former woman’s champion of Bulgaria Adriana Nikolova, and a top Croatian U20 star player, Sandro Safar, Material in Chess, in conjunction with self-publishing company, Lulu.com.
H4S3: Joya Communications Inc. / Marco Polo App:
I reached out directly to Joya CTO Michal Bortnik, with research points from Flare<prev>, and was given a contract UX research position. At Joya, I published significant research on 1) my media theory<McLuhan, Peretti, Spiegel> of “cold to warm”, in which the rate of higher-rate data transfer, such as async and sync video, would increase, if lower-investment mediums were more immediate, and a pathway or upwards transition presented 2) based on my media theory, a feature proposal for a quick interaction “Expressions” feature, that allows users to capture a “silent video”, a max-red capture of a rich facial expression, in order to initiate the warm to cold # state transfer, that can lead to a live video interaction, which was Marco Polo’s forte. They contracted me on this feature in order to increase user retention and first user onboarding, which were identified as problem areas, internally.
H4S4: Flare Social Inc:
Founder & CTO of a Firebase, SWIFT, and WebSockets project that sought to launch an iOS application for messaging, in which users can see each other’s messages char-by-char, if both are online, and stored in the Firebase-db, if offline. We selected WebSockets as our primary transfer protocol<Turing> and developed a leading research case study of the applications of WebSockets in mobile, which I subsequently published to Joya<H4S3>. I oversaw the hiring of 3 iOS developers, a PM, and briefly interviewed an Android lead, before the project ran out of funding.
H4S5: WordPress Developer at Upwork Inc.
I first started on Upwork in March 2020, but no longer have access to my original account. Prior to working here, I’ve been hiring on the platform since 2012, spending about $60k across several dozen hires, in the web design, backend development, an admin assistance verticals. During April-June, my gross income, in first 2 months, was $20k. Originally, I outsourced projects to developers in the Philippines, but since I took a hiatus in June 2020, I’ve since self-trained to become natively competent in Gutenberg development, as well as custom PHP coding. Now, I’m able to offer a vertically integrated service to clients, relying on only my own blood and sweat, from raw coding in PHP, up to high level architecture, and management, from my experience in H4S6.
H4S6: Founder, CEO, CTO, Chief Editor, and growth hacker:
Before Distractify.com sold 28% for $7-mn in 2014, to Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed VP, Ken Lerer at Buzzfeed & Huffpo, the Creative Arts Agency, and Advancit Capital, I was the 92.5% equity holder in the company, which was already turning over a 5x profit margin($300k monthly revenue, $60k expenses). Ultimately, I left the company, selling 1/3 of my remaining shares for $2.1-mn and the rights to CIRC-tech<H4S7>, at a devaluation, because the investors disagreed with my decision to work on Web-RTC, but my business was never in debt, and therefore, need of investment. Originally, my operation of Distractify.com was no different than a small-town flower shop: as the owner, I had to do everything, initially, and eventually built a team of 40 full-time employees, as users, and other members of the community, became bought into the product. I also sunk $60k into WordPress development initially<H4S8>, because I attempted to stretch the platform past its limits, in 2013/4, before pivoting to a custom WAMP-stack, another $160k investment, that the website made back, by the 3rd month of operation! As the Chief Editor, I wrote a style guide for viral content, that went on to influence over 100 companies and $1-bn in total valuation, containing a very granular, 10-pg guide, along with at least 90-pgs of additional comments, over the years, shaping every detail of how a viral web listicle would be written, including headline writing, A/B testing, thumbnail selection, in-ch header format, tone, and narrative intro. I personally interviewed, and hired the tech team, and piloted the direction of scalability, page load speed, integrating with Cloudflare CDN early on, and making novel database-adjustments, to support a website that could manage over 60,000 users concurrently, crashing almost never, per month. We worked with Woven Digital and Google Adsense, later Double Click, to fund $5+ CPM ads, populated ~3 times per page, including sidebar. Before the website launched, I used my YouTube channels<H4S8> to pump an intial Facebook-pg to 60k followers, and drove seed traffic to 20-mn+ view viral posts. Finally, I acqui-hired Perl developer Maarten Schenck, to be our early CTO, and built a primitive version of Sharethrough, called Trendolizer, that monitored viral-potential news around the web, before it broke.
Highlights:
- Recruited, hired, and managed a full-time staff of 20 software engineers, writers, and contractors.
- Developed social media profiles and web properties that reached 40 million monthly unique visitors and over a billion total page views worldwide.
- Led the video production, product design, web development, and web content teams.
- Pitched the company to the founders of Linkedin, the Huffington, and Buzzfeed and secured a
$7 million series A investment led by lightspeed venture partners.
Stack: Ajax, Apache, Backbone.js, CSS3, HTML/DHTML, JavaScript, JQuery, MongoDB, MySQL, Node.js, PHP, Varnish (ESI), XML, Yii2
QArea<a-r>
Distractify is a leading entertainment company in the mobile era. This fascinating portal follows the trend (among Buzzfeed and Upworthy) for inspiring, funny and eye-catching post titles, often in list form, with video, image, and GIF-heavy content.
Platforms: iOS, Android, Web. Integrating Service-oriented architecture. Tasks: Functional testing; Compatibility testing; Regression testing; Ad-hoc testing; UI / UX testing; Validation testing; Smoke testing; Bug reporting; Bug rechecking; Documentation creating.
At Distractify, I led a full-time engineering team that fluctuated between 5 and 25, outsourcing with Eastern European firms QArea, and Luxoft (LXFT). Engineers who worked for me, Anatolii Schevchenko, Shavkat Anyurin, et al, now work at Facebook, and Google, so it’s fair to say, I was the CTO of a fairly elite squad. Despite having no coding experience back then, I was able to 1) take an intimate part, in selecting a tech stack, that built a website, CMS, and analytics suite, that lasted for the next 10 years 2) make innovative decisions with respect to page load times, database optimization, and content delivery network implementation, that made Distractify lightning fast on mobile, a key to our success 3) solve a critical compatibility issue with Facebook, that disabled our thumbnails from displaying properly, restoring traffic from 15-mn per month, a huge drop, to 45-mn per month, in April 2014, helping us secure a $7-mn investment. All the while doing this, I was also the head of content, and on a road show, to pitch to multiple A-list Silicon Valley firms, including Greylock Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, monitoring my team of over 30 full-time employees, remotely.
At Distractify, I proved that I had the chops to research documentation and make long-term technical decisions, such as researching WebRTC, a still in development protocol, and comparing its pros and cons against other established solutions, such as Wowza video codec. The team was testing-oriented, and we had a rigorous staging process, since our live website, was served up to min 2,000 online visitors, at any given time. I implemented high-load testing that is still an industry standard today, and allowed the website to survive unexpected bursts to 45,000+ unique visitors, despite never having reached that load before, organically. Our code was run on AWS servers, which had load-balancing, and our dev-ops team was well-trained to handle all types of emergency situations, and we even had a timezone based nightly protocol, since the team was largely based in Ukraine.
There’s a massive difference between someone who’s just going through the motions, and a CTO, whose brain is sufficiently capacious to take into every possible fault point, and prevent disasters, using the chess principle of prophylaxis, before they occurred. Under my tutelage, Distractify remained an upright shift, despite facing numerous dependencies, to a toxic New York media industry, Facebook’s shoddy API, and unclear requirements, and a very stringent board of directors, whom we brought on, in 2014. Moreover, most of my employees, despite being older than me, all, were still in their 20s; nevertheless, I was able to lead a happy, productive, and well-paid company; I set the standard in base pay in New York at the time, offering $60k per year, to my content writers.
A key to the success of Distractify was the high rate of communication, among our internal decisions, and interoperability among various modalities of decision-making. For instance, our entire team was educated on the mathematic logic of virality, the K-factor: shares per view * clicks per share > 1. Subsequently, our efforts, whether editorial or tech, sought to optimize this ratio, using Google analytics, Sharethrough, and our proprietary technology, Trendolizer, to find quantity-backed ways to optimize. The result was the advent of lazy-loading, bootstrap design, for responsiveness, and various content hacks, in order to increase retention down the page. That means that Distractify.com’s web design is not arbitrary, but very carefully optimized, in every detail, to be maximally generative of shares. We tested, for our most viral, 20-mn+ view articles, at least 500 different headlines, and wrote a custom A/B testing implementation, with Google Analytics.
This was definitely a project that got better as it went on, due to my overall architectural design, of technology, and its integration, with the rest of the team, completely frictionless, a feat that has yet to be achieved, at any other American company, regardless of size. Even as we scaled up in traffic, and headcount, we did not slow down our rate of new content development: in 2015, the company rolled out original video production, that matched the quality of big players like Buzzfeed and Huffpost, but on a much smaller budget, and we were on the way to rolling out our own mobile-first content submission portal, CIRC, before I was dismissed by the board.
Ultimately, we failed to see eye to eye, on the development of new technology, despite the fact that I had recruited, unknown to all at the time, 2 future Facebook / Google tech leads, and I had acquired a top Belgian startup, Trendolizer, with its star Perl developer Maarten Schenck; both Schenck and Anyurin were so enthralled with my tech visualization, that they personally visited the United States, in 2014, and 15, respectively, to work with me, for several months, in person. Anyurin later immigrated, and now works for Google in the Seattle area.
H4S7: Founder, CEO, CTO, co-architect, CMO, product designer:
At Circ technologies, we were first to market with a mobile-first Reddit-clone, similar to Snapchat’s # Live stories feature, that surfaced in 2015/6. I conducted one of the earliest mass-market experiments with WebRTC, a breakthrough communications protocol for establishing bidirectional, peer-to-peer, hyper low-latency video streams, although it could also be used, by our experimentation, for peer-to-server, or peer-to-server-to-peer, as well as unidirectional broadcast. The advantage of WebRTC included its low performance requirements, on RAM, CPU, and GPU, allowing browsers to run video chats, including micro chats of <30-s, which we saw as a significant market opportunity. The product design of CIRC included group-based video feeds, around categories, multi-threaded categories, and a unique implementation of a social list, with a public feed, where you could see your friends’ posts first, before top posts, from the outside, and unique, simplified, virality algorithms, that could generate virality, from friends’ interactions, such as showing you posts friends’ have liked, before top posts from the outside. We experimented with several interaction models, including a text-based feed, in which users can click off to videos, as well as an immersive feed, like Snapchat Stories.
H4S8: Founder, Chief Editor, video producer, Ad sales, media planner:
At 2 Bucks Entertainment, I coordinated posts across 7+ channels, each with at least 50k+ fanbase, as well as 2 flagship channels, ‘AmazingLife247’, and ‘AmazingFilms247’, the former, which was sold to Distractify.com in 2016, in the acquisition event, in return for CIRC-IP<history>. Managing a team of 20-30 part-time workers, and 2 full-time editor/admin, all remote, I was able to generate $80k in annual revenue in 2010/1, my senior year in high school, over $250k in my first freshman year at Georgetown University, and peak at $60k/mo in mid-2012, with a 9x profit margin. As the head of content, I personally approved *every* upload, 2-3 per day, per channel, and oversaw a custom-coded back-end CMS that handled a volume of 200-300 daily submissions from a fanbase of over 1.5 million total subs, and sorted them to our part-time content staff, for evaluation, automatically summed, and displayed the output, to the editing team. We used Sony Vegas, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Photoshop, to produce video and thumbnail content, for the channels. AmazingFilms247 was recognized as the premiere community hub for Call of Duty content, establishing a standard, and launching the careers of several prominent YouTubers, including Daniel Keem(CEO, Drama Alert), KYRSp33dy, and Vikkstar123, all of whom later became multi-millionaires, and full-time content creators.
- Recruited, hired, and managed a part-time staff of over 40 freelance video producers and software engineers.
- Launched over 2 million followers and a billion video views worldwide.
- Filmed, edited, and published over 1000 original videos and managed the video production
team.
References:
Yakun Hu: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~0156af6785cb097391?p=1588711605191471104
Media coverage & academic citations:
Parker, Sandra. “From Gaming Videos to Redefining Instant Messaging: Quinn Hu’s Long Path to Serial Entrepreneurship.” QArea Blog, Medium, 1 Mar. 2019.
Witkowsky, Chris. “Lightspeed Venture Partners Leads $7 MLN Series A Round in Distractify.” PE Hub, 26 June 2014.
Team, The Drum. “Nigel Vaz’s People Worth Knowing: The Drum’s Guest-Editor Reveals Who’ll Be Heading up the next Generation of Pioneers.” The Drum, 27 June 2014.
Gillette, Felix. “Viral Media Is Not Dead: Distractify Gains New Investors, Traffic.” Bloomberg.com, 23 June 2014.
Key quote: “There are a lot of people who are trying to do this now,” says Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “But there is a relatively small number of people who have gotten to this sort of scale.” Distractify’s Quinn, he says, is one of the few with scale. “He is an extraordinary entrepreneur.”
Corner, New. “Tech’s Top Five under 25.” New Corner, 15 Dec. 2014.
Schubarth, Cromwell. “10 Startups That Are Punching above Their Weight.” Bizjournals.com, 21 Nov. 2014.
O’Reilly, Dennis. “Great People Make Great Sites: The Best of the Worst of the Internet?” CNET, 30 May 2014,
Wauters, Robin. “Viral Media Startup Distractify Acqui-Hires Belgium’s Trendolizer.” Tech.eu, 24 Feb. 2014.
Dickey, Megan Rose. “This 20-Year-Old Is the Mastermind behind Distractify, a Fast-Growing Media Startup.” Yahoo! News, Yahoo!, 22 Nov. 2013.
Kelly, Keith J. “Vice Media Suffers from Ad Network.” New York Post, 1 Apr. 2016.
Baym, Nancy. “ECONOMIES OF THE INTERNET II: AFFECT.” Selected Papers of Internet Research 16: The 16th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, 24 Oct. 2015.
Paasonen, Susanna, editor. “Distracted: Affective Value and Fickle Focus.” Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media, MIT Press, 2021.
Team, QArea. “Distractify Project by QArea: Outsourcing Software Development.” QArea: Software Development Company, 1 Nov. 2022.
Parker, Sandra. “From Gaming Videos to Redefining Instant Messaging: Quinn Hu’s Long Path to Serial Entrepreneurship.” QArea Blog, Medium, 1 Mar. 2019.
Witkowsky, Chris. “Lightspeed Venture Partners Leads $7 MLN Series A Round in Distractify.” PE Hub, 26 June 2014.
Team, The Drum. “Nigel Vaz’s People Worth Knowing: The Drum’s Guest-Editor Reveals Who’ll Be Heading up the next Generation of Pioneers.” The Drum, 27 June 2014.
Gillette, Felix. “Viral Media Is Not Dead: Distractify Gains New Investors, Traffic.” Bloomberg.com, 23 June 2014.
Corner, New. “Tech’s Top Five under 25.” New Corner, 15 Dec. 2014.
Schubarth, Cromwell. “10 Startups That Are Punching above Their Weight.” Bizjournals.com, 21 Nov. 2014.
O’Reilly, Dennis. “Great People Make Great Sites: The Best of the Worst of the Internet?” CNET, 30 May 2014,
Wauters, Robin. “Viral Media Startup Distractify Acqui-Hires Belgium’s Trendolizer.” Tech.eu, 24 Feb. 2014.
Dickey, Megan Rose. “This 20-Year-Old Is the Mastermind behind Distractify, a Fast-Growing Media Startup.” Yahoo! News, Yahoo!, 22 Nov. 2013.
Kelly, Keith J. “Vice Media Suffers from Ad Network.” New York Post, 1 Apr. 2016.
Baym, Nancy. “ECONOMIES OF THE INTERNET II: AFFECT.” Selected Papers of Internet Research 16: The 16th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, 24 Oct. 2015.
Paasonen, Susanna, editor. “Distracted: Affective Value and Fickle Focus.” Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media, MIT Press, 2021.