Carleton College is one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. The website gets over several million page views per month spread over tens of thousands of pages. Most of the site is powered by the Reason Content Management System which I initially created as a student in 2002 and spent another year developing as a staff member. This system is still in wide use at Carleton, has been released as an open source project, and continues to be favored over other commercial systems by Carleton.
Features and Items of Interest
As a consultant, my primary role was the Java developer for the warehouse inventory management system for one of our clients. The system was composed of a Struts-based Java web application used on handheld devices (running Windows CE without barcode scanning capabilities) that was connected to a legacy Unidata database. The system was used by hundreds of warehouse workers handling hundreds of pallets of inventory each day. Additionally, the system had to deal with incoming EDI data for shipments due to arrive as well as pre-notify the next businesses in the supply chain with the contents of outgoing shipments.
My role as the Java developer was to continue to extend the warehouse employee facing portion of the application to add new inventory management processes to facilitate various daily activities. Several of the specific applications on the handheld had to deal with very fast barcode scanning rates (up to 1 barcode per second or faster per user), ensure delivery of the information to the server in a spotty wireless network environment, as well as perform several types of validation of the inventory (serial number verification as well as duplicate checks).
This is a private internal service and as such I cannot provide images of the application.
I also acted as primary programmer for the Monster Lot site utilizing the Cake PHP framework. The programming of the site took under two weeks, including user login system, full database-backed management, and powerful searching options including distance based zip code searching. Most of the core functionality is hidden behind the registration requirements.
Phi Theta Kappa is an honors society for students of two-year colleges. At any moment, the organization has tens of thousands of members and far more alumni. As a web developer there, my role was to assist in integration of the various web initiatives with the in-house Java membership system as well as continue efforts in web presence improvement. Part of this process involved working with Carleton to open source the Reason CMS in order to test its viability at Phi Theta Kapa. Ultimately, very few of my efforts came to fruition due to changing requirements, time limitations, and internal politics.
The most important success I achieved while at Phi Theta Kappa occurred during hurricane Katrina. Katrina left the primary headquarters in Mississippi without power and internet for a full week. During that time, I was able to remotely host the full static website as well as create a temporary forum for communication with the organization as well as for members who were affected by the storm. Once power and internet were restored, I assisted in creating and implementing a more robust disaster recovery plan to avoid the kind of problems we had faced.
KTV Media has utilized me as a PHP expert for a few projects.
For KTV Media's client ImageMedia, I created a custom web-based file upload and download application which also allows a nice public view of the assets contained within. This system was built in a generic fashion to allow KTV to repurpose it for other clients.
For Lulu's Cuts I assisted in integrating the Flash forms with the ASP backend and ensured proper functionality for the appointment registration
I have also assisted with Joomla installations and minor programming issues on a number of occassions.
The commute tracker is a very rough exploration of one of favorite hobbies: gleaning interesting trends from personal trace data. In this case, I'm tracking my commute times to and from work via a twitter bot that I send text messages to as well as any relevant notes about those trips. From this dataset, I can start inferring best routes based on home and work departure times, make some educated guesses about how various conditions affect traffic (rain, construction, time of day/month/year), as well as track how much time I'm actually spending at work. There are still some problematic assumptions with the data collection (the most pressing is that Twitter is not reliable enough for timely processing of my messages so timestamps of my trip markers can sometimes be up to 30 minutes off) but I have actually been consistently using the text message data collection method with some success.
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game where players can essentially do what they want in a giant sandbox-style futuristic space-based sci-fi world. The games creator, CCP, has exposed quite a lot of information to developers to build powerful 3rd party tools to assist in all manners of player activities. I've built a few tools using this API using a combination of PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript (primarily the jQuery framework):
Recently started blog collaboratively written by me and my girlfriend on the topic of playing games as a couple. We explore the games that exist, how we play together, what games can do better in the future, and whatever else we want to talk about. We believe cooperative gaming is on the rise and we use our blog as a platform to explore the implications of that for relationships as well as for communities in general.
My resume is available in several formats:
Please feel free to contact me via email for any reason.