Welcome to my website and blog.
I'm Blake Senftner. This website is my blog and career showcase. I have been lucky to be a developer with some great teams and write some amazing software.
I had my first college programming class in '76, while in 5th grade. I've been writing software professionally since age 17, that being 1982. It was during high school of '82 I founded a video game studio for the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 home computers. We called ourselves EathenRoss Software, my best friend Chris Ross and I. That first image in the upper left was our Grave Cave game for the Vic-20. We had games nation wide (USA) in Sears and K-Mart the holiday season of 1982. I wrote the software, Chris achieved our distribution deals, and together we made the packaging and shrink wrapped the packaged games ourselves. That high school game studio was a lot of ambitious and crazy teen energy exposing us to the larger world of professional technology and business. Lessons that proved to be very useful later...
I was one of the original pre-release Apple Macintosh developers, and still have a mimeographed while being authored version of Inside Macintosh with hand scribbled corrections from the Apple OS developers on many of the pages. That was an amazing experience, primarily because the Macintosh Professional Developer's Program was a Harvard Summer School Seminar the summer of 1983, six months before the Mac's release. All the coding was Assembly back then, and I loved it.
I became a member of the 80's 3D graphics research community, where one of my roles was working for Benoit Mandelbrot on his original research publication of Fractal Mathematics. Working at the Boston University 3D Graphics Lab exposed me to scientific visualization work, the foundations of formal 3D computer animation, and my first formal work writing artificial intelligence. The 4th image, top row, is some 3D renderings from my Boston 3D Graphics Lab days: in that image the top is a ray traced motion blurred yellow sphere in a reflective fractal cube, middle are some fractal cracked platonic solids, and the bottom is an AI Simulation language that was my senior thesis. My undergrad thesis was a complete 3D animation language with AI simulation and forecasting.
After undergrad I became an R&D developer for Philips Media, back when CD-ROMs were research. At Philips Media I authored an interactive documentary production system, and then technically led a production team creating 13 different 7+ hour art history documentaries, each repeat produced in 8 languages. I was a speaker at multiple international software conferences, discussing the creation and use of my ASLAN production system, which Philips Media sold as a professional product.
After that I became OS team member of both the 3D0 and the original Sony PlayStation 3D game consoles. Recruited by Electronic Arts before their 3D0 spinout as a separate company, I wrote the original implementation of the 3D0 video subsystem, as well as was a team member of Road Rash 3D0. As the 3D0 failed, I was hired as Sony Computer Entertainment of North America's first software developer, promptly shipped off to Tokyo to work on the finalizing of the PlayStation's operating system.
Over the 90's I worked on over 36 multimedia and/or 3D video game titles (including Tiger Woods Golf, NCAA Football, Brunswick Bowling and more). As the 90's closed I became Director of Skunkworks for the Internet's first Live Video Infrastructure Provider: Rotor Communications. As one of the pioneers of Live Internet Video five years before YouTube, I wrote video codecs and produced a live talk show featuring underground L.A. bands.
After the domcom crash, I worked as a triplicate digital artist / software engineer / financial analysis for Rhythm & Hues Studios an Academy Award winning VFX studio across nine VFX heavy major release feature films. While working in VFX, I also earned a double majored MBA in Finance and International Business. My Master's Thesis is in and I am a global patent author for Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media. Acquiring a global patent is a story.
I attempted to create a new form of advertising with my patent. I envisioned Personalized Video Advertising where you, your family and friends appear in the video adverts streamed to your Internet devices. I launched a startup with fellow VFX veterans and built a complete broadcast quality automated actor replacement pipeline and automatic photo-real digital double creation service. However, launching during 2008's financial crisis and a good number of years before public awareness of deep fake technology, financing was unrealizable and a pivot to the video game industry could not save the company. From the experience of my startup, I gained the interest of a leading Facial Recognition Developer. I became the lead engineer of their flagship product through three generations, earning top 5 placements in the annual NIST Facial Recognition Vendor's Test each year participating. That last image, lower right last row describes the Aureus3D-AI facial recognition software.
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About this web site: I hand coded it myself. The backend is in Python using FastAPI + Postgres, both hosted inside Docker containers. The front end is handwritten static html/CSS, and minimal JavaScript over the Velocity library, for my own personal amusement.