individual

TravelForChange

TFC is a web application designed around the 2008 presidential campaign. On the site, experienced campaigners can connect with donors who will sponsor their travel to swing states. After receiving attention in the mainstream press and around the internet, TFC enabled 295 volunteers to campaign in swing states they may otherwise not have been able to reach.

I developed the backend and frontend of the application.

trackabl.es

trackabl.es is an experiment in personal visualization using mobile devices, particularly the iPhone. Users of the service can declare anything they want to keep a count of and then increment a counter for the trackable on their mobile. Their trackables are graphed over time and can be compared against their friends or the entire userbase.

I developed trackabl.es independently; it is currently dormant while I work on other projects, but it is live on the web.

commgraphs

I became curious about what electronic mediums I use to communicate, so I started tracking SMS, twitter, email, and phone calls. I threw them on some graphs to try and notice some trends. Turns out I almost never use my phone for voice (upon further inspection, I only talk to my parents by voice), I SMS more on the weekends (clearly), and when I SMS more, I email less.

wikitrails

I was a big fan of everything2 back in its prime, but now Wikipedia has almost entirely supplanted the reference elements of e2. Wikipedia will never have the same kind of community that e2 had, but it could at least have the soft link feature. This is a Greasemonkey script that adds a set of links to the bottom of every Wikipedia page you browse. As you travel through Wikipedia, your n-page trail is remembered and shared with others, ultimately influencing the links appearing at the bottom of each page. Wikitrails is currently in use by… a few friends and me.

futurebrowser

Another experiment with Greasemonkey. Before the web became so prevalent, you could play a decent prank on a friend by changing all the clocks in their life ahead/back a day. Now, if someone is confused about the time they head straight to any of a number of websites. futurebrowser attempts to thwart them again– it detects common formats of dates in websites and just nudges them forward a day (or +/- n days, user-settable). I haven’t gotten a chance to deploy this on any friends yet, alas.

school

Relates2

Relates2 was my undergraduate final project. It is a web-tagging product with a semantic twist. With R2, a user can tag any two URIs together with some relationship between them, i.e. this YouTube video depicts this NYTime article. Light amounts of inference can be done upon the information collected in R2, and all of its information is accessible through an open API. My partner and I won the Yahoo! prize for best project for R2. The project is currently dormant, though hunks of code from it made their way into Apture.

CS91SI

I was given the opportunity to lead a student-initiated course at Stanford about programming applications for the web. We covered both frontend and backend development, looking at JavaScript, Flash, Django, AJAX, and a whole slew of other buzzwords. Around 60 people showed up to the first day of class, despite a policy that SICs could have at most 20 students.

professional

silverlight

I am currently one of a handful of graphics developers for the Silverlight Core Runtime made by Microsoft. Silverlight is a browser plugin and media platform that competes with the entrenched Adobe Flash. I had a small feature and several bug fixes in Silverlight 2, and I am responsible for one of the core features in the upcoming Silverlight 3.

cooliris

Cooliris is a browser extension that brings media on the web into a pretty cool 3D interface. Google Image Search, Facebook, Flickr, etc, all can be pulled into a 3D wall that can be browsed very quickly. I added the ability to play videos and Flash content in the wall. With Cooliris a user can now search YouTube quickly and play videos directly in our fullscreen environment. I also added sharing features to the extension, by which a user can share content across their social network of choice quickly.

Apture

Apture enables web authors to transclude content from across the web into their own webpages. Hyperlinks become interactive, and content with Apture becomes more engaging.

I was the first non-founder hire at Apture and architected the backend of the product; I also influenced the direction of the product greatly, as there were only five employees up to its initial launch. While there, I wrote an indexable JSON database before they became fashionable.

meebo

meebo is a web-based IM client. It also connects to emeddable web chatrings. I was one of the first hires at the company, where I developed backend features for the main client, wrote the first stats engine for the embedded chat product, and prototyped a mobile client.