AI-Accelerated MVP
Move from unresolved opportunity to a functioning product without creating months of unnecessary process.
Founder · Product Builder · Fractional CTO
Turn difficult ideas into working systems.
I identify practical gaps, learn the whole problem, and build the system needed to solve it — combining decades of product experience with modern software engineering and agentic AI.
Founder-built products
Working businesses, not hypothetical case studies.
Cool Cat Games
Original phone-first entertainment for hospitality venues and events.
Visit project →Bartenderz International
Automated hospitality training and operating documents.
Visit project →RecoverNode
Guarded recovery for self-hosted Linux services.
Visit project →Rhythmhoüz
A purpose-built professional network for the music industry.
Visit project →How I work
Three ways to work together.
Platforms & Web Services
Scalable architecture and implementation for real products, including deployment and operational thinking.
Fractional CTO
Strategy, leadership and hands-on delivery for founders and teams that need judgment as well as execution.
A Founder's Operating Counterpart
More than another advisor.
Some founders need a senior counterpart.
Someone who can understand the vision, challenge assumptions, translate direction into daily operating decisions, and take ownership of execution.
I work at that boundary—close enough to the product and technology to make decisions, senior enough to establish standards and guide teams, and hands-on enough to remove the blockers that prevent plans from becoming working systems.
Complementary leadership
The strongest relationship resembles a near-peer partnership: complementary strengths, candid communication, and enough mutual respect that either person could comfortably report to the other if the roles were reversed.
That allows the founder to concentrate on the work only the founder can do while a trusted operating counterpart converts the vision into priorities, decisions, and dependable execution.
“Across each phase of my career, I have followed the same pattern: identify a practical gap, learn every part of the problem, and build the system needed to solve it.”
— Barton Anderson
Work
Selected platforms, game systems, and branded experiences.
Engineered under real deadlines, commercial constraints, and complex operating requirements.
EA Sports (NASCAR) — 3D “Locker” skin preview, approval + upload workflow
Electronic Arts · 2008–2010 · NASCAR 09 (credited)
What it enabled: players could understand, preview, approve, and upload a 3D skin into the EA Locker for in-game use.
What I owned: end-to-end UI/UX + engineering, upload pipeline, and graphics-file manipulation to meet in-game requirements.
Constraint: first-of-its-kind system with a hard 6-month delivery window.
Stack: ActionScript; custom 3D display interface built by me plus common 3D interface integration.
Leadership: EA had no established web practice at the time. I authored their first internal web development guide to standardize the lifecycle from analysis through release, along with QA planning and technical documentation.
Outcome: shipped with the title — a working pipeline that let players race custom skins against others.
EA Sports (NCAA Football) — “Create-a-Team” prototype
Electronic Arts · 2008–2010 · NCAA Football 10 (credited)
What it enabled: users could create a full team experience — team, school, players and more — via the web, then play against others in game.
Timeline: four months to prototype and hand off to another team for completion.
What I owned: product flow, UX and engineering implementation.
Stack: ActionScript.
Outcome: shipped with the title. The concept established a pattern later used across other EA console titles.
Kizzang — rapid mobile game delivery + leadership through change
Las Vegas · 3½ years
Goal: deliver a mobile game on aggressive timelines while also acting as a multiplier for the team.
Collaboration: partnered tightly with the graphics team, CTO and CEO to keep scope, quality and deadlines aligned.
Leadership: helped stabilize delivery and team momentum when the CTO departed.
Outcome: shipped and profitable, with improved delivery discipline and team synergy under pressure.
Rhythmhoüz — a purpose-built professional network for the music industry
Co-founded 2019
The opportunity: general social networks did not reflect the interconnected professional ecosystem behind recorded music, live performance, touring, promotion, production, education, manufacturing, and music-industry services.
What I created: a full-stack platform connecting professionals, artists and bands, venues, studios, labels, promoters, manufacturers, music schools, merchants, charities, and other industry participants.
Platform capabilities: role-specific profiles, artist and band pages, electronic press kits, media management, professional connections, opportunity listings, messaging, search and discovery, metrics, administration, subscriptions, and controlled profile visibility.
Engineering context: I hand-coded and engineered the platform in 2020, before modern AI coding agents became part of my development workflow.
Outcome: a working multi-role industry platform translating a complicated professional ecosystem into a cohesive product.
M&M's / Mars — branded application reskin
Six-month contract
Goal: reskin the NASCAR 3D application I created in ActionScript to reflect M&M's campaign branding using provided assets.
Constraint: planned two-month schedule.
Delivery: completed in approximately one month without sacrificing polish or brand fidelity.
Outcome: accelerated launch readiness for the campaign with a clean, on-brand user experience.
Cool Cat Games — a strategic pivot from digital jukebox to original venue gaming
Origin: Cool Cat Games began as a digital jukebox intended to compete with established venue entertainment platforms. After analyzing the costs and restrictions of commercial music licensing, I chose not to force an unsustainable model.
The pivot: I redirected the platform toward interactive games for bars, restaurants, clubs and events, where there was greater creative flexibility and a more practical path to commercialization.
How it works: guests participate from their phones, venue televisions become part of the experience, and staff controls coordinate the room-wide game.
What I built: product strategy, game concepts, user experience, full-stack software, licensing controls, venue operations, and cloud-plus-local deployment workflows.
Development approach: agentic AI accelerates research, implementation, testing, debugging and documentation while I retain direct control over architecture, product judgment and production quality.
RecoverNode — full-path monitoring and guarded recovery for self-hosted Linux
The problem: self-hosted services often fail quietly. A certificate stops renewing, DNS answers differ inside and outside the network, a service restarts in a loop — and a server reporting “healthy” is not proof that users are reaching the right site.
What I built: a Linux resilience platform that watches the whole path a visitor depends on — DNS, TLS, the reverse proxy, and the application — from an independent observer, and performs guarded recovery when something fails.
Guardrails: recovery budgets, cooldowns, persistent state, and lockout protection so automation cannot turn a small failure into a larger one.
Capabilities: DNS path integrity across internal and public resolvers, including split-horizon leakage and stale cache detection; TLS and certificate-expiration monitoring; network configuration-drift analysis; multi-site incident correlation; duplicate-alert suppression; hardware-watchdog integration; and verification, rollback, and uninstall tools.
Open source: a free, read-only Linux Resilience Audit script that checks a server for the problems that most often take self-hosted sites down, with a one-line fix for each finding.
Bartenderz International — customized training systems for independent hospitality businesses
Concept first explored in 2007
The gap: large hospitality groups have structured training and accountability documents; independent bars and restaurants usually rely on whatever a manager carries in their head.
How it works: operators answer a guided questionnaire about their business, service model, beverage program, and expectations. The platform turns those answers into a coordinated package of eight documents — a bartender training manual, opening, closing, and bar-setup checklists, a responsible alcohol service policy, a new-hire training plan, an evaluation, and a manager signoff.
What I built: the complete online system — questionnaire, document generation, secure tokenized delivery, download recovery, and optional editable and branded output — plus a public library of reviewed drink recipes and hospitality training guides.
References
What people I've worked with have said.
“Barton was instrumental in developing and delivering integrated web-based / console videogame features for multiple premier EA Sports titles, something that had never been done before at the time.”
“He established best practices and guidelines for future web application development for Electronic Arts, Tiburon.”
“Barton always displayed a high degree of integrity, responsibility, and ambition. He owned a completely new system to our organization and helped tremendously in new business opportunities for us.”
“Barton has excellent interpersonal skills and can communicate effectively with senior executives, management, and staff.”
“His understanding of what it takes to start, build, and maintain a company are rare assets that can be a great benefit to any company.”
“His enthusiasm and drive is second to none.”
Media
Network and Viral Effects
A short video on the dynamics that let a product gain more users, more value, and more revenue as it grows — and how Rhythmhoüz uses several network effects in its platform.
Watch Network and Viral Effects
Free PDF Download
Web Product Delivery Flow
A practical guide to taking a web product from an unresolved idea to a working, measurable, maintainable system — discovery, specification, build, quality, launch, and operation.
The 2026 edition covers what has changed since I first wrote it: AI-assisted engineering, automated delivery pipelines, accessibility and privacy as requirements, and making content discoverable by search engines and AI assistants.
Download the free PDFContact
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