MindSet

  • Python
  • Django
  • Bootstrap
  • ES6
  • JQuery
  • Backbone
  • Underscore
  • Ansible
  • Vagrant
MindSet

When: 2014-2017

Contribution: Full Stack Developer, DevOps

Description: MindSet: The Good Habit App makes it easy for users to choose small, easily managed habits and gradually move toward bigger target behaviors. It promotes physical activity, improved sleep, better eating, positive emotion and social support. MindSet includes a fully responsive web app and native apps (Android and iOS) for tracking habits.

It integrates with Fitbit, Misfit, and Nokia APIs to chart steps, weight, and blood pressure alongside habit completion and mood data. Reminders to track are sent via push notification and text message.

MindSet development follows agile best practices like continuous integration and deploy. It includes a full suite of unit tests, code conforming to PEP8 and eslint rules, error monitoring, and downtime alerts.

More Info: MindSet sales page

MoodHacker

  • Python
  • Django
  • Bootstrap
  • JQuery
  • Backbone
  • Underscore
  • Ansible
  • Vagrant
MoodHacker

When: 2014-2017

Contribution: Full Stack Developer, DevOps

Description: MoodHacker is a way to track, understand, and improve your mood with scientific mood boosting techniques. This is a fully responsive web app, with companion apps for iOS and Android built with PhoneGap.

MoodHacker was developed with agile development best practices like continuous integration and deploy, a full suite of unit tests with pytest, code style following PEP8 and eslint rules, and error monitoring and downtime alerts.

More Info: MoodHacker sales page

Author Alcove

  • Python
  • Django
  • JQuery
  • RQ
  • Solr
  • Memcached
  • Redis
  • Varnish
  • Git
  • Vagrant
  • Puppet
Author Alcove

When: 2012-2014

Contribution: Solo Founder, Architect, Full Stack Engineer, System Administrator

Description: Author Alcove is a book discovery service. “Even if your best friend was a book critic he couldn’t give you recommendations this good.”

Book and author data is pulled in via an API. The site uses a variation of the item-item algorithm which was shown to have the best performance on this dataset. A few of the smaller details that make the web application shine are a full site search powered by Solr, infinite scroll, a streamlined account creation process, and a delightfully simple UI.

Stats tracking, conversion analysis, and lifecycle emails have been built into the project from the outset.

More info: An IPython notebook with website traffic analysis and notes on scaling and capacity planning is available. Visit the live site at authoralcove.com.

GrokCode Website

  • Jekyll
  • Liquid Templates
  • Sass
  • JavaScript
GrokCode Screenshot

When: 2007-2018

Contribution: Writer, Theme Porter

Description: GrokCode has been alive in one form or another since 2007. It was previously the home of the GrokCode Development Shop and blog, but now that I have moved away from consulting, it serves as an archive of articles on software development. It is a space for publishing tutorials, long form articles, and opinion pieces covering the various facets of building things on the internet.

GrokCode is a Jekyll static site running on GitHub pages, with comments provided by Staticman.

More info: You’re already here, but you can look at the GrokCode homepage or find out more about me.

PPC Reporting System

  • J2EE
  • myFaces
  • JSP
  • Tiles
  • Apache Trinidad
  • Apache Tomcat
  • SQL Server
  • SVN
  • Hudson
PPC Reporting System

When: 2007-2010

Contribution: Architect, Full Stack Engineer, Requirements Analyst, System Administrator

Description: A comprehensive reporting system for monitoring the pay-per-click (PPC) performance of online advertisements. The Reporting System is used by SEO firms and their Fortune 1000 clients.

Data is imported via SOAP APIs, parsed CSV files, and manual imports. The project features a multi-tiered login system which allows administrators to manage client login credentials, management features for adding new search engines as data sources, and 11 different reports which can be broken down by a variety of data metrics. The system is scaled to handle real time generation of custom reports with hundreds of thousands of data points.

Geotargeter for Amazon

  • PHP
  • Javascript
  • JQuery
  • AJAX
  • HTML
  • WordPress
  • Git
Amazon Affiliate Geotargeter WordPress Plugin

When: 2011-2013

Contribution: Solo Developer

Description: The Geotargeter for Amazon WordPress Plugin increases earnings by allowing publishers to earn worldwide commissions. The plugin determines a website visitor’s location using an API and then changes any links to Amazon to point to the visitor’s local Amazon store. Features include performance caching, secure AJAX calls, and configuration options via the WordPress admin area.

The accompanying website uses Stripe for payments.

Odds & Ends

Django Template Field: An open source Django app for storing templates in the database and rendering them via a database manager. Check out the docs, download from PyPI, or browse the source code.

Django Email Analytics: An open source Django app that seamlessly adds Google Analytics tracking codes to emails sent with Django. It provides a wrapper for Django’s standard email backends. Download the app from PyPI or browse the source on Github.

Joke generator: The joke generator is programmatically seeded with knowledge about different nouns and modifiers, then uses that vocabulary to make jokes. All of the jokes are of the form: “What do you get when you cross X with Y?” This code was written as a final project for a graduate level AI class at UC Berkeley. Q: What do you get when you cross a port with Frosted Flakes? A: I don’t know but it’s serial! Lisp Source code.

Even more odds & ends on GitHub