I'm a software dev that has a need to create things that work well.
I help develop the flagship product LeanSentry. LeanSentry automatically detects & diagnoses your ASP.NET web applications.
A super-simple Chrome extension to help a friend with online editing. She frequently needed to convert proper names to title case, as well as get defitions, synonyms, and antonyms. I don't think I ever fully completed it.
I built a simple SOAP-based web service endpoint for a client. All it had to do was received a request and stuff it into a MSSQL database.
I also advised the client on their options when it came to scale and performance.
Can't talk about it. Involved low-level programming.
With two other team members, I wrote a tar-based file system for a component-based academic operating system named Composite.
Composite itself had no file system component, so the idea was to give it some sort of backing storage provider. The simplest was just an archive (tar).
Just in case you were wondering, the tar specification is awful.
The course is outlined at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mmburke/courses/csci146/.
I worked on Project A. It was a team project in which we had to create a Responsible Conduct of Research system.
In order to work with certain materials or objects, you need to be certified to do that work (e.g. lasers, since they can easily damage eye sight and so on). The RCR system was designed to show who received training when, where, and by who, in additional to showing why they needed said training.
Our project was chosen as the best. I laid out the DB schema, wrote the session & authentication handlers, all of the AJAX code for selecting researchers, the layout files, and several other large parts of the program.
The School of Washington was an on-campus printed publication. I built a custom WordPress theme and installed everything for them.
During the rush process for a fraternity, there are a lot of rushees. This makes it difficult in larger fraternities to have any ordered voice or vote as to which rushees they deem most important to recruit.
I built a system that had private logins, and as rushees came in we would catalog their name & information in Excel. At the end of the night, all rushees were exported into a MySQL db through an Excel reader.
From there, fraternity members could vote and comment on rushees.
I also built a mobile-only version so it was easy and accessible on phones.
I performed robotics research under Dr. Rahul Simha at the George Washington University with money from the National Science Foundation.
The goal was to make a unified robotics operating system, similar to ROS, but exclusively in Java. We wanted to have an API that freshmen could engage with, and upperclassmen could peel back to do more advanced behavior.
We used 4 different robots and a simulator. You could write a program that interfaced with our API that then worked on all platforms.
Bounty was a challenge I set for myself. I worked all day at the high school and programmed Bounty all night. It was an interactive web RPG with AJAX-like behavior using iframes and javascript.
It included high score boards, leveling, a massive administrative back end, different maps & game areas, and a story. Eventually I wanted players to be able to dual each other but that never came about.
The website has gone through several revisions, which you can find at premre.com. I no longer maintain said website, and haven't for years.
The rental brochure application was straight forward. The company needed an easy way to manage and consistently lay out properties they had for rent. They then needed to be able to print them. Very straightforward.
Built a full content management system for the website, since a lot of custom features were required. Ended up building a full tree structure in the database and in PHP without ever being taught data structures or effective techinques for recursion. First major project.
The district calendar was a different challenge since they explicitly wanted the backing database to be MS Access. The calendar also needed to be printable.
As for tech staff, I created custom Windows images to be put on each machine. This included extensive security tweaks. I also frequently dealth with user management in Active Directory.
I met a man named Andrew Male (amale.zibings.com) while playing a game called DroidArena (long defunct). He helped me learn how program, and eventually I ended up writing a forum for his company. It was more of an exercise in database design and understanding how to get so many moving pieces working.
OzNet was my first "big" project. It was a full CMS that I built for myself. I built multiple themes, and visitors could switch between the themes. State was saved via cookies. Originally I wanted OzNet to be a single-sign on portal (akin to something like OpenId), but that never came to fruition.