Projects

Good Morning CMC

I send an email every morning with the day's events on campus, what happened with our sports teams, what's going on in the news, and what's for dinner in the dining halls. Eventually the plan is to include messages from local advertisers. Check out a sample email, sign up here, or browse the source code.
Cool Stuff I've Learned: Flask, viral marketing, Mercurial, one-click deploys, XML parsing/screen scraping, CSS3, SQLite, YAML, incorporating user feedback, iterative design
Status: Over 500 students (about 2 in 5 CMCers) are currently subscribed. Currently expanding to Pomona, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Pitzer


RSS Feeds after 5.

I built a tool that blocks all updates to your RSS feeds between midnight and 5pm, so you can focus on sleeping and getting work done. Add your own feeds here or grab the source code.
Cool Stuff I've Learned: Writing scalable apps with Google App Engine, server-side processing, cron jobs, Vim, minimizing bandwidth, technical specifications for RSS feeds, Google Reader RSS feed uniqueness requirements

News Editor, CMC Forum

I write and edit news pieces for an online publication for CMC students. I also write opinion. You should read my articles here. Cool Stuff I've Learned: Writing, Revising written material multiple times, editing, WordPress Status: Ongoing


Personal Blog

I practice writing and share what I've been reading about with friends and family. Check out my shared links on Delicious, or my blog. Ongoing




Cardboard Smile

My friend Alex Mitchell makes awesome Claremont t-shirts. I built a website that he can use to sell his shirts.
Status: On hiatus. Check out the site here.


Currently Learning:

  • Rails
  • How to contribute to an open source project (Pypy)
  • How to make money online
  • How to get more done every day
  • How to interview well
  • Rock Climbing

Previous Projects

Senior Thesis

I conducted user tests on a series of redesigned balance sheets. Users are presented with a company's income statement, balance sheet and cash flow, and given a series of representative tasks. I use a mouse tracker and screen capture software to evaluate the user's success. In the future we plan on testing balance sheet redesigns. I'm hosting the code on BitBucket. Cool Stuff I Learned: Mousetracking with Javascript, how to build heatmaps based on mouse movements, how to pressure people into taking your experiment, how to design an experiment so people have an incentive to take it, how to manage a large project
Status: I submitted my thesis last semester. You can read it here.

Atlassian documentation redesign

I tried to apply some of the best documentation design principles currently available to a Confluence theme for Atlassian's documentation. The theme is complete but I do not own the source code. Here are some screenshots, and explanation.
Cool Stuff I Learned: Apache Velocity, Fitts' Law, basic usability principles, how to build a theme for Confluence, how to rally people around your internship project

Virgil (Atlassian)

I built a Javascript tool for the support team during my summer internship. When a user begins to describe a query, the script searches our documentation for relevant results. These results are displayed in real time next to the user's input. The goal is to reduce the number of preventable support issues that users ask, which are prohibitively expensive. I blogged about it on Atlassian's Dev Blog here. Cool Stuff I Learned: How to use Google's search API, how to add link tracking to URL's, how to parse a query using regular expressions in Javascript Status: Live. To view it live, go to this page, create a login and fill in a sample report.

Seva Mandir website

I worked on a redesign of the website for Seva Mandir, an NGO in Udaipur, India. Status: Not Implemented. The NGO was worried about being unable to maintain or make changes to the site.

"8 Myths of Foreign Aid" video

I created a 10 minute video covering eight common misconceptions about foreign aid. Play the video below, or read the accompanying article.

Seva Mandir blog redesign

I redesigned Seva Mandir's blog and incorporated it into their main site, instead of on blogspot.com. Status: Live. Check it out here.

Seva Mandir newsletter

I built an HTML newsletter for Seva Mandir, an NGO in Udaipur, India, according to their specifications. I also built a "Subscribe to newsletter" PHP form Status: Live. Subscribe by visiting sevamandir.org.

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