alanG/\lan lives – Visualize, Design, Develop, Affect – inspired Technologist

Coordinated a team of five students of different skill sets in creating a flash enabled and HTML accessible website as a follow up to our group’s work with troubled youth in the West Kendall school district. Graphic design used in presentations of G.U.T.S. identity was also in my charge.

Created a web archive of the social and academic life of the two largest National Honor Societies in Braddock HS. Was the first historian to use web technologies to successfully implement a usable and elegant photo archiving system that advocated emerging social software trends i.e tagging. Also created mixed media presentations for end of the year celebrations.

Used SHA task-tracking system to interact remotely with clients, learn their requirements, and present my solutions. Assisted senior developer in researching and designing a solution to upgrade apache_hooks SAPI in PHP 5.1.4 to Apache HTTPD 2.0. Maintained a blog of useful tips and tricks that were learned along the way.

During a period of transition, taught myself the inner workings of the java web application behind the world’s largest collection of animal recordings and associated video. Researched ways of improving the accessibility and usability of the application for a specific user base and ultimately prototyped, tested, and implemented an Ajax-enabled browse feature to ease exploration and discovery of the gigantic collection.

Learned about emerging privacy and surveillance concerns in this digital age through interviews and research aimed at creating an affective computing installation for a historical Cornell landmark. Learned and implemented basic computing sensor and microprocessing technologies and associated visualization tools for the affective system.

Analyzed research requirements and provided plausible technical solutions, ultimately siding with Mediawiki as our core platform. Acquired much knowledge on writing extensions and themes for MW, about MW internals and the MW DB schema. Researched and implemented ways of making MW technology more intuitive for users unfamiliar with wiki technology. Worked by myself and with other developers during different stages of the project which taught me much about best practices in software engineering.

Assisted SummerBridge staff in designing and leading educational activities for underprivileged middle-school children. Developed a series of lessons intended to be a simple introduction to web design.