Portfolio
I’m a freelance web developer who emphasises superior application architecture, high efficiency, and outstanding documentation. Take a look at some the larger projects I’ve worked on professionally, which are listed below.
iVillage.com and HUGE
One of my most recent freelance projects is with iVillage.com through the up-and-coming Brooklyn-based design firm HUGE Inc. iVillage, one of the earliest and best-known 90’s dot-com startups is a female-oriented site offering articles on fitness, parenting, entertainment, beauty and others. Remembered as having one of the most successful IPOs of all time, the company was later purchased by NBC Universal in 2006.
The company underwent a series of feature additions and site revamps in the past year. I was contracted to architect and develop the internal REST API for a new social vertical to be launched this year.
Zype.com
Zype is an under-development celebrity portal that brings together many of the internet’s social celebrity information to one place. Interested in Megan Fox, or any other celeb for that matter? You won’t find more pictures, tweets, news, and videos anywhere else.
I was hired to jump on the project in order to speed up development for the site, which was written entirely in Ruby on Rails. Working remotely with a developer Orlando, Florida I co-developed the administrative end and utility processes that kept the site full of content and serving its users.
Teaches.it
A self-developed and launch service, Teaches.it is a service that makes building a website for a school classroom as easy as it should be. For years, teachers were forced to pay absurd yearly costs by companies like TeacherWeb simply for a place to post homework, notes, parent communications, pictures, and other documents.
Cutting TeacherWeb’s subscription cost nearly in half, and offering a slick Web 2.0 user-interface, Teaches.it offers educators a place to build themselves an online presence with a cost that fits nicely into a tight budget. Used by teachers from fund-pressed districts like Asbury Park, New Jersey and Baltimore, Maryland, it’s easy to see that the service is light on the wallet, and powerful as well. Teaches.it maintains a happy and growing customer base.
PayPal and the Google Search Appliance
PayPal, the online standard in electronic payment and checkout services, collects and analyzes customer feedback taken via surveys on it’s website. With such a large customer base, they quickly found they needed a fast, efficient way to index, search, and sort through the large number of responses they recieved.
Employed with LTech at the time, I worked directly with the California-based firm to help point their newly installed Google Search Appliance towards their responses, and develop an innovative search front-end to their data. Truly stretching the bounds of how the GSA was traditionally used, with the developed interface, PayPal analysts could now search for feedback by phrases, ratings, date ranges, and more.
Employon & Lucene
EmployOn is a job search portal boasting one of the largest collections of jobs among any job board. EmployOn typically has about 8 million posted jobs at any given time. Needless to say, a user’s job search is still expected to be expedient.
EmployOn made the switch from using Autonomy, a proprietary search product, to using the newly developed Lucene search engine. One of the major reasons for the switch focused on the lengthy time job queries would take — sometimes in excess of 25 seconds.
As a developer on the team tasked to help migrate EmployOn’s job search, my major function was to write the search API which took a user’s query parameters, create a Lucene query, execute it, and returne the results. A major goal of this project was to keep the user experience exactly the same — the only thing they would notice is an increased search time.
An increase was exactly what was in line: That 25 second search time dropped to single-digit milliseconds after the use of Lucene. And that includes the extensive business logic involved in EmployOn’s searches.
GetTheJob & Facebook
In June, 2007, The massively popular social networking site Facebook released its Application API, allowing third-party developers to create interactive widgets that facebook users could ‘install’ on their accounts. These widgets allowed the addition of an unlimited field of functionality to Facebook, giving users the power to gadgetize or personalize their Facebook account.
In the week following the release of the Facebook platform, I built and (maintained) the facebook application for GetTheJob, a job search engine. This application allowed users to find where their friends worked, search for jobs at those location, or simply search for jobs in their desired locations. The application, ‘Jobs’, as it is called, leveraged the GetTheJob affiliate API and Facebook API to create the first Job search applications on Facebook.
The smaller-scale stuff
I don’t work entirely on projects with larger clients either — I’ve developed smaller-scale website for municipalities and other organizations, such as the Borough of North Arlington, NJ and the Lyndhurst Police Emergency Squad.
