Chief Technology Officer at Altair Interactive

Shooting for the stars

I’ve always had a passion for broadcasting. My maternal grandfather worked in radio and television for much of his career. As my first tech mentor, his stories of scaling transmitter towers, going on air during a crisis, and working in the first color TV studio in the area fascinated me. I even spent some time at a broadcast production company earlier in my career, a nod in his direction. As a result, when the live streaming video space began to take off, I was immediately drawn to it. I loved the accessibility it provided folks to share their stories and their hobbies. I loved seeing the technology evolve and improve as well.

What I didn’t love was seeing how the major players in the space were failing to protect the very users that bring value to their platform. The incumbents were like a dog that caught the car, and weren’t quite sure what to do with it, being torn between doing right by marginalized communities and trying to appease their purchasers in focusing on profitability. Determined to try and make a difference, I started Altair with a colleague in the summer of 2020. Altair was envisioned to be an equitable, user-first live video streaming platform for user generated content. We worked to build a platform that would allow content creators to have more control over their content, and to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all users. As CTO, I was Altair’s application architect, DevOps engineer and project manager. I lead the development on our Django powered backend servers, built out our hosting stack atop AWS EKS, Rancher and RDS, and oversaw frontend development.

While Altair was not able to launch due to lack of operational runway, the team and I were able to complete development work on the platform’s MVP features. More importantly, I personally feel we aided by strengthening the voices of the marginalized and underrepresented in the greater streaming community. We also saw many of Altair’s launch and planned future features being adopted by the more notable flagship streaming platforms’ Trust and Safety programs. Despite our choice not to launch, I continue to believe to this day that our work and our mission made a positive impact on the streaming space at large.