Pod Predictions | Rob Erskine

Experience

6/2023 — Present

Principal Architect - Amdocs Studios

Empowered enterprise clients including Rogers Communications, Southwest Airlines, and DreamWorks Animation to adopt AI in order to drive greater efficiency, creativity, at operational scale. Designed and deployed agentic harnesses, optimized token usage to reduce inference costs, built reusable tools and skills, and connected disparate systems via Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations

10/2021 — 6/2023

Managing Architect - Projekt202

Led a team of developers building next-generation CMS solutions for clients including Steamship Authority, Wasabi Technologies, Double Good, Blink Charging, and Boston Medical Center, leveraging headless architecture, microservices, and the JAMstack to deliver fast, scalable, and maintainable digital platforms.

4/2019 — 10/2021

VP, Director of Creative Technology - Hill Holliday

Promoted to run select Retail accounts and all Healthcare accounts for Hill Holliday and Hill Holliday Health. Oversee digital projects and products from start to finish. Responsibilities include staffing, scoping, researching, and approving third-party vendors, development partners, and working closely with internal teams to launch projects on time and within budget. Responsible for growing the creative technology team and direct report's career paths. I also need to keep up with evolving technologies, as well as be responsible for bringing innovative problem solving and solutions to clients.

5/2017 — 4/2019

Lead Creative Technologist - Hill Holliday

I led internal as well as external projects, teams, and initiatives for clients like Bank of America, Harvard Pilgrim, and a complete rebuild of PartyCity.com that led to a 16% increase in conversion. I also built out incremental updates, accessibility, SEO, and page speed/performance practices, and (my personal favorite) scalable design systems for clients. Work with creative, strategy, analytics, and other teams on implementing best practices and efficiencies, with a focus on all steps in the user journey.

11/2014 — 4/2017

Senior Creative Technologist - Hill Holliday

Develop, manage, and tech lead projects as well as mentor multiple junior team members in an agile environment. Saw projects for clients like John Hancock, the JM Smucker Company, and Novartis through from its inception all the way to post-launch updates; including managing repositories, deployments to different environments, maintaining high code quality, analytically driven decisions, all while promoting a fun and engaging team morale.

7/2012 — 11/2014

Freelance Developer

Connelly Partners — Worked on front-end and back-end applications with other developers and creatives at Connelly Partners in Boston, MA. I worked with clients like Cayan, MassVacation, Nexaplus, Stowe Mountain Resort, and Wellness Pet Food.

Hubspot — Worked within a small internal project team for one of Hubspot’s products, Signals. I created and developed advertising collateral, mostly in the form of personalized landing pages, used to A/B test, and measure signups within their own CRM system.

11/2011 — 11/2012

Front-End Developer - 38 Studios

Worked within a highly disciplined agile team to conceptualize, design, and develop intuitive web suites for 38 Studios’ flagship products, interactive IP sites, mobile games, and digital platforms. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has a Metacritic score of 81/100.

9/2009 — 6/2012

Johnson & Wales University - Student

Graduated from Johnson & Wales University's school of engineering and design with a 3.9 GPA with a concentration in web technologies. I competed in the National Student Advertising Campaign all 3 years and placed 4th and 3rd in the country, as well as a best Plansbook award for Nissan. I also competed in the DECA web design competition where I won nationals two times in a row. Lastly, I won the university's President's trophy during my senior year.

Awards

12/2019

Champion for Good - Ad Council

I was honored to be featured by the Ad Council in their Champion for Good series. I've worked on numerous Ad Council campaigns and also serve on their UX Advisory Committee.

2017

Communication Arts - Interactive Competition Winner

Work for Edward M. Kennedy Institute was one of ten featured in the CommArts Interactive 2017 print issue along with an interview with me and the Creative Director on the project.

2016

CodePen Spark

Article on data, analytics, and incremental updates was featured in the first-ever CodePen Spark newsletter, sent to over 75,000 users:

2014

Gold Hatchbowls

Social campign for Necco Candy: #TweetHearts. Direct Response. Product Innovation. We built a Twitter bot and Web application that printed your tweets on heart wafers and shipped them directly to you. It absolutely blew up on Buzzfeed.

Passion Projects

2018

Blackdog Brewing Co

I started home-brewing my own beer. I've developed over 60 batches ranging from IPAs (well, mostly IPAs), amber ales, and even a few porters and stouts. The latter of which I've developed into a yearly New Years tradition. I'll brew a bourbon stout on January 1st, and then pop it open 364 days later to celebrate. Hit me up and i'll gladly share with you :)

2018

BFMW

Established an LLC with a few close friends to design and develop digital products and solutions for small businesses and non-profits in New England.

2015

BaeBot

A super lovely significant other SMS chatbot to text you back when no one else will. Picked up on BostInno, Twilio’s Developer blog, and other publications. https://baebot.biz

2014

CowsayPLZ

A really dumb node.js bot that replicates every developer’s favorite terminal mammal. It printed philosophical messages out of an chat bubble from an ACII art cow. Utilized sentiment analysis (before AI was cool) to customize the cow's mood.

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I started watching Love Is Blind with my wife Molly (a little reluctantly, for the record). By the time the couples left the pods I was hooked, and the best part wasn't even the show. It was calling how each couple would end up.

We wanted an easy way to swap predictions with our friends and hold each other to them after the finale. Then I got to thinking that everyone should get to play. So I built Pod Predictions. Takes are cheap. Receipts are forever.

Call it before the altar does

You go couple by couple and pick how it ends: Married, Split at the altar, or Never reach the altar, plus why you think so. If you're feeling saucy you can add up to three wild calls for the season. Then you lock it in, get a share link for the group chat, and see how the rest of the internet called it. (No peeking, though. The crowd results stay hidden until you lock in your own picks.)

It covers Season 11 in Boston and every season back to Season 1. No accounts, no cookies, no ads. Your picks save on your device as you go and only leave it when you lock in.

How it's made

The app is React, React Router, and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind (every city gets its own color theme) and set in Fraunces for the headlines. It runs on Cloudflare Workers, with a small API and a D1 database that stores the locked-in picks for the crowd results. Share links get their IDs from Nano ID.

The workshop side was the most fun. Vitest covers the scoring, validation, and season data. ImageMagick crops every cast photo to size, and Apple's Vision framework finds the faces for the round avatars, so I didn't have to hand-crop a single reality star.

rob erskine

@ErskineRob

·Follow

#LoveIsBlind takes are cheap. Receipts are forever! I built a site to lock in your wedding day predictions for the couples who got engaged in the pods- share your picks with the group chat and see what the whole world thinks. New episodes drop this Weds 👀 Choose wisely💍

Watch on X

2:11 AM · Oct 18, 2026

Read 1 reply

Go lock in your picks and choose wisely. 💍

Do you have a dumb idea (like this one) that you're looking to collaborate on? I'd love to help out. Feel free to reach out.