Portfolio

I created this site to sell myself as a magician. I've been doing sleight-of-hand illusions for about eight years now. Magic is a passion of mine! I used some custom jQuery animations for the navigation bar, then the Lightbox plugin for the gallery.

I created this site for my father. He is a freelance studio musician who does lots of composing, orchestrating, and recording work for movies. It uses the super-cool Lavalamp jQuery plugin for the navigation bar, as well as the beautiful jQuery plugin Galleria, which I used to display a couple photo galleries. To play the sample audio tracks, I used JQuery's JPlayer plugin. I was surprised by how well it works! I bet if you try to listen to a few tracks, you will be pleasantly surprised as well.

I created this logo using GIMP for my father's website. I knew the rest of the site was going to be basically colorless, so I wanted the colors in this logo to be eye-catching and beautiful. I'm very pleased with how it resulted.

Teachbug was a project a group of my peers and I worked on in our Software Development class a while back. Basically, it was intended to be online browser-based software for teachers, that included a gradebook, an interactive seating chart, an in-depth behavior tracker, as well as an assignment tracker and calendar. I was in charge of creating the homepage, the MySQL database for user credentials, and the PHP scripts for user authentication and session cookie tracking. I was particularly proud of the AJAX I came up with to give the user feedback when they log in. If the credentials are correct, a "Logging in..." message is displayed. If the credentials are incorrect, a message displays to tell that to the user. It was my first experience with AJAX, and I thought it had a very neat result. I'm still fascinated by what a programmer can do with it...As far as this project goes, we didn't finish it. But the next year, the new Software Development students picked up right where we left off.

I designed this logo using GIMP for a company some of my friends and I tried to start up. They asked for some help and gave me an idea of what they wanted. I took it, added some of my own ideas, and came up with this!

Retki was a web application I worked during my senior year of Westmont. For both semesters, I worked on this quite a bit. Retki is a date-planner application. It enables people to plan outings easier than ever before. I had a database full of activities from around the country which I gathered by writing a web scraper in Ruby. Once a user entered their address, a PHP script queried my MySQL database and returned results within a specified radius of their location. Then, using an intuitive JQuery and AJAX nterface, the user could pick and choose individual activities to make up their overall plan. Once finished, they could view their route on Google Maps, print out their itinerary, or email their plan to their friends. It has been a complete blast working on this. I did all the server side stuff using PHP. Looking back, I think it would have been significantly easier using Ruby on Rails. However, I did not know Ruby when I began this project. Regardless, I have learned an incredible amount! It has always seemed to be that the best way to learn is to learn by doing. I have never had a more applicable project to say that about.

This is a PHP script I wrote to help with the activity selection process on Retki. I particularly enjoyed writing the needle/haystack function. I had not done anything like that before in PHP, so it was really interesting learning how to go about it! I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.

This is an AJAX script I wrote in JQuery. This segment of code drives most of the visual/interactive selection process on my Retki project. I always find JQuery and AJAX really rewarding to work with because of the visual instant gratification you get when coding it.

The main project for my Databases class was to design and create a database model for my college. I created around 12 different relations that modeled students, professors, classes, dorms, classrooms, and all the relationships between them. Our language of choice was PostgreSQL. Besides creating the database, I had to populate it with data, which I generated using a Bash script. Then I had to create a small PHP application to interact with it. I learned a TON about databases through this class and project. It was time well spent! The Bash script and necessary files can be downloaded here in a .tar.gz file.

The final project for my Computer Organization and Architecture class was to build and program a robot to battle an opponent. Each robot had to have sensors to tell where the opponent was. To win, a robot had to push its opponent outside of the ring. My team built our robot using Legos, with a Handyboard as the controller. We programmed our software in Assembly, for the Motorola 68HC11 chip. This was a blast to program, but I also experienced the hell that is debugging in Assembly. While it was exceptionally frustrating at times, I loved the gratification I received when I saw my code causing a robot to move around. The code for my final project can be found here.

For my databases course, we had several installments of one overall project due over the course of the semester. This installment was the culmination of the class. We used a PostGRESQL database, and I had to create the database, scripts to populate the database with random data, and then I created an application to go over it. This is a screenshot of my application. I decided to use AJAX for the entire site. No action requires a refresh of the page, instead the query selection and the query itself are all made via AJAX calls. I was pretty proud of it.

This is one of the PHP scripts I wrote for my final project in my Databases course. This specific script handled all the database calls.