Hi, I’m Sam.I build web products for Outside.
I’m a product engineer at Outside Online. Over the last three years I’ve shipped a social network, a new article page serving millions of users a month, a product finder, and a new entry point for user registration.
Selected work
- Led the engineering effort to rebuild Outside’s article platform on the headless Next.js frontend — the network’s highest-traffic surface, serving millions of monthly readers
- Shipped the recirculation system powering “Read Next” modules across every article, driving additional pageviews per session and increasing overall engagement
- Built article revenue features including prestitial ad units, viewport-optimized ad refresh, and JW Player video preroll — directly increasing ad yield per article
- Designed the article template as the foundational component for Outside’s editorial product, used across every article render on the network
- Shipped comment preview and recovery flows that deepen reader engagement and improve resilience on the highest-traffic surface
- Powered subscriber growth across the Outside Network by shipping standalone newsletter subscription pages with brand-specific designs — expanding the email revenue channel
- Built the newsletter CMS editor in WordPress so editors can launch new newsletters without engineering involvement — eliminating the engineering bottleneck for newsletter growth
- Integrated signup with HubSpot and Rudderstack, creating a fully automated marketing pipeline reaching millions of Outside subscribers
- Owned the product end-to-end: WordPress admin, GraphQL subgraph, Next.js frontend, reverse-proxy routing, and signup analytics — enabling the entire newsletter program to scale reliably
- Shipped the Deals Finder, a new affiliate commerce surface generating revenue from outdoor gear sales across 8+ Outside brands (Backpacker, Yoga Journal, Ski, Velo, Run, Climbing, Triathlete, Outside Online)
- Scaled AI-generated product descriptions to thousands of deals with no editorial effort, using build-time generation and PostgreSQL caching — making the inventory cost-effective to maintain
- Built SEO infrastructure (XML sitemaps with lastmod dates, schema.org structured data) driving organic search discovery of deals across every brand
- Implemented affiliate analytics tracking engagement and revenue performance, giving the business real-time visibility into the deals channel
- Shipped the follow system powering creator-audience relationships across Outside’s social feed, driving return visits and logged-in retention
- Designed the gesture-gated analytics layer that became the site-wide standard for coordinating user identity, feature flags, and third-party tracking — a force multiplier the whole platform now reuses
- Built the toast notification system as a reusable web component pattern adopted across all Outside brands for engagement features
- Established the Activity Feed as the default home experience for authenticated users, increasing time-on-site and repeat visits
Contact
The best way to reach me is by email. You can also find me on X.