New Breeders
newbreeders.com is a map-based social application for action sports, helping people find the best spots to ski, skate, bike, surf, and the like. I began working at New Breeders BV as the lead developer during the site’s private beta, where the bulk of my time went into extending and refining the internal Javascript framework they had built, serious codebase refactoring, and continual performance optimizations. The site is very much a “web 2.0″ citizen, with all the challenges that brings. Today I continue steadily developing the site to fit comfortably into the landscape of services and social media streams coming from around the web.
New Breeders plans to expand on more platforms and mobile devices in particular. Soon after the site’s 1.0 release I helped build a standalone iPhone application that connects to the geospatial data engine on our servers, supported by the iPhone’s own geolocation service.
Colophon: Javascript, RIA, Google Maps, AJAX, Open Web, KML, Geospatial Services, SEO, URL Rewriting, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Social Media, iPhone
Link: www.newbreeders.com
RHIN (Regional Health Information Network)
Avocare hired me to help build a Health Information Exchange portal serving federated and centralized MDM systems across the State of Florida. As the lead developer, I programmed a suite of SaaS products, including a document management system, electronic referrals, a personal health record (PHR) portal, an online Rx writer, and the core application, a physician’s portal where the health record management transpired.
The project’s greatest technical challenges were modeling the complexity inherent in the health care domain and clinic workflows as business- and data-transfer objects, and the analytical demands of developing services that would accurately normalize health care information from the wilds of provider data streams and legacy software. HIPAA auditing and data governance demands added the additional constraints of a strict temporal logging system, snapshots of HTML a user was viewing, and other analytics necessary for compliant accountability trails.
Colophon: ASP.NET, Serialization, MDM, Web Services, ORM, BO/DTO, DDD, Windows Services, Threading, Transactional Processing, Records Management, XML/XSLT, HL7, VPN
Link: www.avocarehealth.com
Florida Lobbyist Directory
Working on FLD under Bellwether, I created an online public research and legislative watchdog tool in order to improve transparency in Florida politics. The UI and reports look simple, and that’s the point. FLD aggregates publically available political data from a number of governmental sources, in whose brambles a lot of accountability is tangled and lost.
The idea was to provide the site’s visitors with an at-a-glance sense of how money was moving through the hands of lobbyists, and help in predicting funding trends, although it turned out to be just as useful a service if not moreso for lobbyists keeping tabs on each other and each others firms.
The site continues to register decent traffic, especially during the legislative session, and we sell premium accounts with access to business intelligence reports and fresher data.
Colophon: ASP.NET 3.5, LINQ, Spidering, Identity Resolution, Master Data Management, Web Services
Link: www.floridalobbyistdirectory.com
Bitable, Branchable Code!
To be honest, I wish I had more projects I could publish for public distribution. My 2009 New Year’s Resolution was to “share more code”, but a lot of my career work has occurred within commercial products, and I regrettably haven’t made it more of a priority to extract plugins from client work or contribute back to the OS community nearly as much as I’ve drawn from it.
As time goes on I hope to change that, and try to focus my personal development projects in ways where I can leverage elements of the work for public consumption. For starters, I’m hosting the following on github:
Palimpsest: a Rails CMS
Building a CMS is like a coverage test for your skill across the range of web development problems on a given platform. Palimpsest is my stab at composing a CMS for Ruby on Rails.
Bellwether had been using an internal Rails 1.x CMS we built for several 501(c) clients, and Palimpsest was a product of the common needs found we found there. The github incarnation is frozen from any more involvement on my part, but Bellwether continues to customize and grow it along with Rails to support individual client projects.
Demo: http://palimpsest.bellwethersystems.com
github: http://github.com/TertiumQuid/Palimpsest/tree/master
Ave Imperator: a Facebook game
A Facebook game of PVP gladiatorial combat, written in ASP.NET 3.5. I wrote Ave Imperator to experiment with the Facebook platform, and published it in beta, but withdrew it before going much further than what you’ll see in github.
Combat occurs through the comparison of pre-selected scripts available to individual gladiators – i.e. a combination of RoboWars style scripting and Douglas Hofstadter’s math games like Undercut.
github: http://github.com/TertiumQuid/Ave-Imperator/tree/master
Aphelion Trigger: a browser-based strategy game
A 4X/Strategy game, also written in ASP.NET 3.5. Designed around tactical complexity and emergent player behavior. I designed this with a friend of mine, and we concentrated on driving player interaction through subterfuge-based gameplay and patterns lifted from the social networking design space.
github: http://github.com/TertiumQuid/Aphelion-Trigger/tree/master
