GameApp

Problem

The industry's standard boardgame manager's online services are not mobile or user friendly. Without a PC, using them is very cumbersome and frustrating.

Solution

The inspiration for creating this app stemmed from my desire to have access to a digital catalogue of my boardgames in an independent and native mobile environment. Additionally, I wanted a tool that allowed me to access quick rule references and have the ability to log and track the stats for each of the games I play...something BGG doesn't have. Hence, GameApp was born.

How

Using the LAMP stack and BoardGameGeek's API, I was able to create a mobile-friendly web app that incorporates all the management tools BGG users have grown to love with the addition of my desired wishes. GameApp is built completely independent from BoardGameGeek with the supplimental assistence of it's API. Should BGG's API's public access ever cease or go down, GameApp will still be available and usable...something I was firm about implementing. Additionally, GameApp users can share their game's Quick Rules with other users and their Wishlists with family and friends.

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Familink

Problem

I can't tell you how many times I've read a version of this line, epilogued, in an email: "I don't have everyone's email address. Please forward this to everyone I missed!" I digress. A family is the heart of any person's social group. And as much as we would like to, keeping in touch and organizing events with all of our family members can be difficult. People move. Contact points change. Calendars rarley sync. How do we make sure that heart keeps beating?

Solution

To solve this problem, I created Familink as a way for all family members to stay connected and "in-the-loop". With Familink, users can add, edit, and reference all family member's contact information, birthdays and anniversaries, and leverage this through Family Units to send emails, create events, and post forum messages. Staying connected is now so much easier!

How

The biggest problem I ran into when creating Familink was the notion that its success depended on people having easy and full access to the app WHILE maintaining a secure environment. But waiting for each family member to create their own user-accounts meant access to EVERYONE's details would be slow and irregular, if complete at all. To solve this, I decided to make a communal, group login for each whole family. This is set up by a family administrator who has their own admin login with access to adding family members and family units. This means, once the administrator sets up their family's site, all family members can instantly start using Familink and it's benefits.

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PIP Admin

Problem

My client was keeping all her client records and projects in separate spreadsheet files. As her business grew, accessing them, effectively, was becoming cumbersome.

Solution

I created an admin dashboard for this client so she can access all of her client's data, track the projects she is working on for them, as well as archive other business related data like mileage and sales for tax purposes. She needed it to be clean, simple to use, and effective.

How

Using her entered data, I was able to track and display stats for her clients and their projects, and display them, dashboard-style, as a visual reference to her. Within each project, she can track tasks, recommendations, sessions, and cost/income. Additionally, using HTTPS, I was able to tap into her phone's location data so she didn't have to worry about manually tracking mileage. The tool was designed to be intuitive with minimal input required from her to keep detailed numbers, logs, and stats.

Due to proprietary reasons, visiting this app will not allow users to create an account or use the app. However, its code can be found on GitHub.

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MyMuseum

Background

Remember as a kid when you would find something really cool? ...a rock...a bug...a small toy...but to you, this "something" was worth more than anything. To keep it safe and available for future viewing, you'd bring it home and place it in a special treasure chest reserved only for those things most important to you...and, in essence, curated your own mini museum of curiosities.

Problem

As adults, we still have treasure chests filled with our most prized possessions. Completely worthless to others, these intrinsic-valued items are worth more to us than gold...family heirlooms, personal memories, things our children have made...and while each of these items are safe in our homes, sometimes we'd like to have access to them all the time.

Solution

In an effort to allow people to have access to their treasures all the time, I created this web app. With it, users can create a museum of exhibits and pictures and descriptions of all those items they hold most dear. And unlike a physical museum, they can visit this one anytime.

How

Aside from personal curation, the other big thing I wanted to accomplish with this app was the ability for users to share their museums with other users through the site...a social network. After signing up, all accounts are password protected, complete with hash and salt, and users can add, edit, and delete, at will, from their individual exhibits. Users may also search for friends' museums through an integrated request/accept feature...including real-time notifications for the user...and then visit them once given a ticket.

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PrettyNeat

Problem

News reports always seem to be negative in nature...someone getting hurt, someone getting killed, someone getting taken advantage of. A simple broadcast always left me frustrated with the world. Why is bad the only news that gets reported? Why is that what sells? I got tired of it.

Solution

I wanted a place to find stories and articles that did not focus on the bad. There are so many good things going on out there. Why can't those get reported? This site came about because of my simple wish to read the news and end with a greater faith in humanity rather than frustration with it.

How

Originally, I scraped the web with a Python AI program I wrote that looked for "positive and inspirational" articles and stories. I knew the content I wanted to find, however, quickly found what one person thought was inspirational was not what another might. As simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication, and sometimes the most efficient, I decided to be that "intelligence" I was looking for. I read the news multiple times everyday anyway, so finding articles would not be an inconvenience. Using Pocket's API, JSON, PHP, and jQuery, I was able to personally curate this website with things I wanted to share with the world...things that I feel are positive and inspirational. Every day, it refreshes with 9 new stories.

In addition to the articles, the site hosts a free subscription-based service that delivers the seven most-clicked stories from the past week to subscribers' inboxes.

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In Concert

Problem

Project Manager applications are bloated, inefficient, and user UN-friendly.

Solution

I collaborated with a group to create a Project Manager web app that is simple to use and not filled with things a team does not need.

How

I was personally responsible for integrating real-time notifications into the program. Originally, I used SignalR, which is a nice tool in C#.Net that "listens" to a database table for changes, but, since it required a constant connection, it conflicted with the program's CRUD model. Plan B...using the CRUD model to establish a read connection every few seconds. Using MVC.Net, my program takes any change to a SQL table, brought about by the addition of an item, and displays that change in a partial-view, updated on any given project's dashboard. If a user is logged in, the change will be presented in the partial-view's streaming notification list. If not logged in, upon logging in the user will be presented with a list of changes since last login.

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Data Generator

Problem

Software testing, especially software dealing with users and their accounts, requires data. To make sure things work properly, a tester needs to generate that data and run it through the software, just as the software's users would. In one of my earlier testing situations, I actually generated thousands of lines of that data manually. How stupid.

Solution

With this Data Generator, users can freely generate any amount of columns or rows of real-looking data and export that data to a CSV file.

How

My first task was to figure out how to get a large data set to generate data from. The problem with many data generators out there is the data looks fake. I wanted mine to look real. For names and addresses, I accessed the open source US Census data and added the thousands of lines of data to my database. Numbers were also easy to generate as a random set. Gender was also taken into consideration and Male/Female entities are generated properly. Email addresses were my problem. To achieve a level of "realness," I used generation from the name database and then added @ a random word domain. Originally, also, I just set up the app to generate data (imagine that?!). However, after using it for a few testing tasks, I quickly realized the ability to save a data-set setup would be extremely helpful so I could recreate the same data-set's data, differently, multiple times. So, I added optional user accounts with the ability for users to save their setups and quickly re-generate new data at a button's press.

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Facebook Search App

Problem

A client approached me with a problem. He had a Facebook page for his business but received so many daily wall posts from his customers that reading through each of them, to find relevant material and questions, became cumbersome.

Solution

To solve this problem, I created a web app that parsed through the company's Facebook Wall. In doing so, the app found posts containing specified text parameters, dynamically set by the client, and displayed those posts on a separate page so he could respond to them and get relevant data more efficiently.

How

Using C#.Net and MVC.Net, along with the Facebook API and JSON, I wanted the app to be very simple to use since my client did not have a lot of technological knowledge. After delivery, he simply needed to log into his Facebook account at runtime and the app took care of the rest. The text parameters were housed in a text file, that could sit on his desktop, and could be edited, at will, with any word, phrase, or punctuation he chose. At runtime, the app reads that text file and displays any Facebook post containing those parameters to a new webpage.

Project Euler

Continuing Education for Software Engineers

"If you don't use it, you lose it." Aptly true, this wisdom presents a very real element of human knowledge. Just like any muscle requires exercise to strengthen, so too does our brain. In an ongoing effort to sharpen my computational thinking and logic, I decided to take on Project Euler. This is a website dedicated to a series of over 500 computational problems, based off the works of famed mathematician Leonhard Euler, intended to be solved with mathematics and algorithmic computer programming. Problems are of varying difficulty but each is solvable, in less than a minute, using an efficiently written algorithm on a modestly powered computer.

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