ReleaseBot, a Slack bot to improve communication for the code release process for NBCUniversal News Group, built during a summer internship. I saw the bot from just an idea, to design, implementation, presentation to stakeholders, proof of concept, and into production. I also created thorough documentation for maintenance and further development of ReleaseBot and on-boarded another developer to maintain the bot after my internship ended. While designing the bot, I also worked closely with a coworker to define a concise Jira workflow that accurately reflected the release process.
I loved getting to see this project from idea to production! Before my internship ended, I got to see the NBCNews.com team transition to fully relying on my ReleaseBot for code release communication. A month after my internship ended, I received word that the bot is now also being used to release Today.com!
“Tapesko” search engine, with Eric Musyoka and Gargi Sharma. We first implemented a basic search engine through a learn.co course. Building off of Gargi’s search engine implementation, we decided how to improve the search engine, and worked remotely and then at a hack day to implement our improvements. I created the front-end using Google App Engine and Java servlets. I also designed the Tapesko logo, created slides, and led our team presentation. Created as part of Google’s CodeU mentorship program. (GitHub)
Info Vis: College Diversity in the NESCAC schools done with Emily Sarich as part of our Information Visualization class. The work included meeting with admissions at Middlebury College, data collection from various NESCAC school websites, hours of data cleaning, planning what to explore in the data and how to present the data, and implementing our visualizations with D3.js in a website. (GitHub)
Info Vis: Explanation of SparkClouds done with Aayam Poudel as part of our Information Visualization class. The work included research, creating a website, and presenting a description and analysis for the class. (GitHub)
Ruby on Rails web app for Campus Events created with Trevor Truog, with help from Kevin Skoglund’s Lynda.com Ruby on Rails 4 Essential Training. Used Ruby on Rails, MVC framework, HTML, and CSS. Created and maintained an SQL database through Rails, including a rich join table and data validation on forms. Deployed app with Heroku.
You can explore the app on Heroku. Unfortunately, creating and searching for events does not currently work in the deployed version, because the solr gem (used for searching) requires a paid Heroku add-on to work. However, everything works well if you run the app locally, which you can do based on the app’s README. (GitHub)
Info Vis: Interactive representations of projects and tag frequency that helped me learn and showcase interactive information visualization with D3.js, along with creating and maintaining an ElasticSearch instance. I used Python with Tornado to serve the site, which mostly consists of one static page. The static page calls an ElasticSearch server to get the information to be visualized, using elasticsearch-py. I also made a video demo of the project, including a tour of the code. (GitHub)
A History of Western Music, a website covering a brief overview of Western music from the Medieval Period to the Baroque Era. (GitHub)
Python client library for interacting with the Open Science Framework API. This was my main project as a Software Developer intern with the Center for Open Science. Note that client is still a work in progress (and that progress passed into the hands of another developer at the end of August 2015).
My work was to create the foundation of design, tests, implementation, and documentation for the library. The goal of the project is to expand the reach of the OSF API to users with basic Python knowledge, and to provide an example for 60+ Center for Open Science developers to build software using the new OSF API. I also designed thorough documentation of my work to onboard the next developer to the client library project. (GitHub)
This website! The site you are looking at is hosted for free on GitHub.com. I decided to make this my next website project because it meant I would learn several new technologies, including Markdown, Ruby, and Jekyll, and would get more experience with HTML and CSS.
This site currently looks much less fancy than the WordPress website I had (e.g. the WP site was fully responsive and had multiple columns that adjusted in size and location depending on the size of the viewing browser; it also had a lot more pictures!), but the GitHub site requires much more code work on my end and enables me to play with the code a lot more than WordPress did.
Another pro is that I’m not paying a yearly fee for web hosting, but I’m sure I will have future website projects for which I go back to using a paid service for hosting! This current site is just the next step in my journey as a web developer. (GitHub)