Shown by default are past and present projects of mine, most of which incorporate both design and technical details, some of which were the result of collaboration. For the most up-to-date snapshot of things I'm messing around with, take a look around my github repo.
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Groupthink [www]
Discovering the A Song of Ice and Fire subreddit gave me a whole new way to nerd out on my book knowledge while watching Game of Thrones. After leaving Parse, I decided that exploring the intricate discussions within these very tightly knit subcultures would be an interesting side project to provide a bit of structure during my unemployment.
Groupthink is a way to visualize reply-relationships between users: who replies particularly often to whom, and are there subreddits that encourage disproportionately tightly correlated relationships? How often do such relationships span subreddits? I'm not sure how well I ultimately answered these questions — I should probably consult a real data scientist — but this gave me a chance to play with a lot of new technology. (Golang, React/Flux, D3, Neo4j, Docker, 2015)
Excellent Excrement [png 1 ⋅ png 2 ⋅ icon]
Adding a new dog to the family required some adjustment from all parties— most notably, it is the first time I've had to track another living thing's... excrement.
While other trackers exist on the App Store, I took this as an opportunity to spend a couple of days learning Swift, experimenting with Firebase, playing with iOS App Extensions, and trying to build an exclusively-emoji interface. The dots in the date headers represent incidents (green = feces; yellow = urine) along a timeline for that day, in an attempt to surface patterns. (Swift, Firebase, 2015)
Counter [src ⋅ png]
Since moving away from the official AIM application and Windows—ages ago—I've hankered for my very own useful version of Nalsoft AIM Log Manager for analyzing my personal relationships via chat. After a couple of false starts (read: excuses to explore writing desktop apps using PyObjC, Flex, and wxPython), my perennial side project is a Mac app that analyzes libpurple-produced IM logs (Adium, Pidgin, etc) and generates useful graphs from the data. (Objective-C, 2009-present)
Tom + Lorenzo iPhone App [iTunes]
A popular pop culture + fashion commentary blog, tomandlorenzo.com, has a mobile web experience (via Wordpress Mobile), which I found subpar and insufficiently flexible. Instead, I spent a weekend building a thin wrapper around their blog's feed.
The app features a native home page, easy browsing through the blog's posts, and filtering the posts displayed by category. Released early April, this reached 1000 downloads within a couple weeks (Objective-C, 2013).
Ridejoy iPhone App [walkthrough ⋅ design ⋅ press]
My friends at Ridejoy (YC S11) were looking for someone to build a mobile app to go with their existing Rails app / web service, and I was looking for an excuse to learn something new. General functionality includes: client/server data synchronization, intelligent date/time selection, all custom UI.
I began learning iOS in December, started working with them to design / build the app in mid-January, and submitted it to the App Store mid-July (after a couple rounds of full-app revision). UX design credit to Suelyn Yu; visual design credit to Seth Warrick. (Objective-C, 2012)
Venuetastic [jpg 1 ⋅ jpg 2 ⋅ press]
Venuetastic was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2011 class. We were hoping to build the easiest way to find the perfect venue for your next event. Design credit to the wonderful Dennis Eusebio. (Ruby/Javascript, 2011)
Top Kill Prime [src ⋅ png]
Top Kill Prime was the result of a 24-hour Game Jam (hosted by Gabe Smedresman), which was designed to be a simple, Space Invaders-like game that "grew in complexity" as play continued. I had the pleasure of spending that time cranking with Chris Cornell, Max McGuire, and Aaron Perry-Zucker. (Actionscript, 2010)
Osprey [IEEE ⋅ pdf ⋅ slides ⋅ png]
Osprey was a final project-turned-publication. Two teammates and I built a distributed database based on the idea of chained declustering to support dynamic load balancing. The photo above represents screenshots of live performance tests run on the system. Since the end of the semester, we worked on running the database across clusters of MIT machines, performance improvements, and published a paper in ICDE 2010. (Java, 2009)
Python syntax highlighter, for a project within the PLW [png]
As an undergraduate in the Media Lab, certain unsavory tasks are often hoisted onto one's plate in order to help the research along. I took a couple months and threw together a simple syntax highlighter in Objective-C for light-duty Python editing, designed to be integrated into E15, a project within the Physical Language Workshop.
While several open-source rich text editors already exist, this was written from scratch in order to provide the most lightweight solution available to the research group. If nothing else, it was an interesting foray into desktop applications, and was useful for the ultimate project. (Objective-C, 2008)
Virtual Beauty visualization [mov ⋅ png]
Through MIT's externship program, I was able to spend time with Jane Nisselson at Virtual Beauty. Our aim was to produce a video representing the results of a research performed at a scientific institution. I used Processing to animate a 3D "field" representing the different amounts of a specific odor in the air, as well as Drosophila larvae traveling through the space. (Java, Processing, 2008)
MIT Brass Rat Brochure [jpg ⋅ pdf ⋅ context]
Each year, a committee of 12 students is selected to represent a graduating class, and design that year's iconic Brass Rat. I was the webmaster / print designer for the committee ("RingComm"), and worked on the brochure with art provided by Eugene Jang. (Illustrator, 2007)
Hypertext [mov]
For fun: a video project around MIT, tracking the progress of a "magnetic poetry"-style message board over the course of a day. (Physical media/iMovie, 2007)