Hi, I'm Roger Braunstein. I take your ideas and I make them real. I build things that you touch, see, hear, feel. My job is to make you smile when you use them. I do this with only a keyboard and mouse. If you have a great idea, something new, something challenging, something that will make others smile, I want to work with you to make it real. I'm a programmer, and you can hire me.

Partlyhuman

Partlyhuman, incorporated is my company, a peaceful room crammed with tech in my home of Portland, Oregon. I've been running Partlyhuman full-time since 2008. My clients are in New York, San Francisco, Boston. They are mostly small agencies with big accounts.

What I do

I build installations, touchscreens, VR experiences. I make websites - a lot of websites - for mobile and for desktop, static sites and sites with complex backends. Multi-device applications that link native apps, servers, and web. Every now and then I get paid to write a game. This mix of projects changes all the time, as do the technologies. Want to do something different? I'm all ears.

What sets me apart

I possess vast enthusiasm and energy, a trove of experience built on the foundation of a classical Computer Science education, and an eye for design and user experience. After delivering something like 100 projects over the last decade and working in roles from developer to architect to Head of Technology, I understand project management. Beyond programming, a crucial part of my job is working with you to consider budget, time, and features to deliver the best outcome for each individual engagement. I thrive on challenges, and enjoy taking on broad responsibilities in my work, like building both frontend and backend, or automating processes to minimize your effort. Not least, I'm pretty silly and easy to work and get along with.

Past

Kid with a Commodore 64. Math leads into programming. The joy of writing, then watching that code coming to life. Volunteering at local TV station. Webmaster at high school. CS degree at Carnegie Mellon. Camera, editing at college TV station leads into motion graphics, visual effects. Spend a summer painting fireballs and erasing wires for Power Rangers (2002). Entry level programming at AOL. Colleague shows me Flash - animation and fluidity, created with code. I write a feature that ships in the AOL client (2003). Web exploding with creativity through Flash and I want a piece. Blur of sleepless nights coding sites for friends, family, contests, anything, biking to work after sunup. Scrolling through postings by agencies busy redefining the web: every job requires 2 years experience, an address in New York. I pretend to have both, call in sick, take the train to Manhattan. Sony Music takes a chance on me, I pack my bags and set out to prove them right. Making animated banners and microsites for J-Lo, Cake, Star Wars soundtracks, from Amerie to Xzibit (2004). Couldn't be happier, until they restructured and I realized I could. With work to show and crazy energy, I land at Firstborn, whose sites I'd been obsessing over all those nights, reloading and analyzing by the pixel. Learn tough lessons about the ad agency world. Win my first FWA. Build a touchscreen shoe kiosk that scans your foot, displays scan in isometric 3D, lets the customer buy a build-to-order shoe then and there (2005). Decide to move the needle back towards engineering, join Schematic, where I get to work at bigger scales, on bigger teams. Learn about process. Help build the video player used across every NBC channel (2006). Architect an award-winning, sweeping site relaunch for the agency (2007), ironically right before its sale. Technical editing for colleagues' books leads into authoring an ebook on then-new Adobe Flex (2007) and the ActionScript 3.0 Bible, a thousand-page missing manual, and its near-totally rewritten 2nd Edition (2010). Meet a duo of legendary Swedish designers and join them as the head of technology as they start their own agency, Your Majesty. Learn what it takes to bootstrap an agency, and that I'm happiest when writing code.

Present

Side job moves to the fore and Partlyhuman is incorporated. I write a multiplayer Bomberman clone that turns surprise hit, clocking a million plays in its first week (2008). The iPhone is opened to third-party apps. Another dev and I make an iOS camera toy that hits #1 on the Entertainment charts (2009). A beautiful site for a Picasso exhibition at MoMA, designed by another personal hero (2010). I start using Unity for installations, including a bizarre one at the Creators Project. An advergame for Chevy on iPhone voiced by two of my favorite comedians (2010). I help build installations in the University of Florida, Coke Museum, and Barneys (2011). Reactive TV graphics for a show on NBC Sports and again for its relaunch (2012). Interactive installations featured in holiday window displays at Saks (2013) and Bloomingdale's (2014). A VR cycling experience (2015) and a meme generator mobile site gone viral (2015). Through this, innumerable web sites.

Future

The heart of my business is in the web and that's not changing. Or, it changes as the web does, radically and constantly. I enjoy my current mix of web and installation work. I'd like to do more in VR and games. And I'd love to incorporate machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing into future work. I've been dedicating more time to personal projects and explorations, such as Pebble apps, libraries, random productivity apps made to scratch personal itches, game jams, and live show visuals.

For More

Many contracts prohibit me from sharing publicly. Contact me for access to my 2016 showreel, out now.

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