Projects

NoEssay
side project
2013-present
Django
I got fed up with the lack of a good scholarship search engine. Existing sites funnel students into scammy for-profit institutions. This is ridiculous because there are literally tens of thousands of legit scholarships out there. NoEssay aggregates the good ones. The UI looks like google.

DebateTab
failed startup
2011
Node.js, MongoDB, Backbone.js, Twilio
DebateTab was a registration and tabulation system for high school speech and debate tournaments. My cofounders and I took this company through UT’s 1 Semester Startup course. Ask me for the source.

Near Space Weather Balloon
personal project
2011
Node.js, jQuery, Java
In December 2012 I launched weather balloon to the edge of space with some friends. We built an Android app and a Node.js application to track it in real time. See the full writeup.

Real Time Indoor Navigation for Android
UT Austin
2011
Node.js, Java, jQuery
For my senior design project I built a real-time indoor tracking system for Android phones. The mobile application determines the user’s indoor location using Wi-Fi fingerprinting. The location is plotted on a map and sent to the web application for remote monitoring and analytics. Open house was December 1st, 2011. Click the title for a brief writeup.

Devcomm Extraction Automation (DEA)
IBM
2010-2011
J2EE, JavaServer Faces, Websphere, db2, jQuery
DEA is an enterprise Java app that automates an internal process at IBM. Long story short, a large data operation that used to suck up 30 person-hours a week now takes 30 minutes. This description is deliberately vague.

lolstack
Trillworks LLC
2010-2011
Object Oriented PHP, MySQL, Apache, C++, jQuery, HTML, CSS
lolstack is an image sharing site that cultivates original content through community-driven voting, duplicate detection via perceptual hashing, and virtual currency incentives.

MultiScope
The Institute for Advanced Technology
2009
VB.NET, a stack of archaic user manuals
The IAT had a bunch of old oscilloscopes around the lab, but getting data off them was problematic. There were different makes and models (HP, Tektronix, LeCroy) all employing different data transfer standards. I wrote a data acquisition app that was compatible with all of them. As far as I know, no commercial software talks to as many types of scope. Workstation picture Screenshot

Laser Profilometer
The Institute for Advanced Technology
2009-2010
LabVIEW, Zaber mechanical slides, lasers, NI DAQ hardware
The IAT needed a better way to measure gouging effects on the rails of its railguns. I worked in a small group to construct a 2-axis laser profilometer to take profiles of damaged rails with a high degree of precision. At one point I was programming it out of my dorm room. Picture

Mind of the Crowd
Trillworks LLC
2009
LAMP stack (PHP)
My first serious web venture, MOTC was a simple get-paid-to site that attained ramen profitability, but ultimately wasn’t worth the time. The profits are partially funding the more recent projects.  It was a good failure if only for showing me the ropes of internet marketing.

Linux Kernel Optimization
ExxonMobil Science and Engineering Fair
2008
C, Bash
I built a Linux from Scratch distro for a specific model of Dell laptop by choosing the best kernel modules for the device’s hardware. I then wrote a series of bash scripts to run rudimentary benchmarks. This doesn’t sound very impressive in retrospect, but some judges from academia and industry thought it was worth 3rd place.

2532|Gigs
Sourceforce project
2006-2008
PHP, MySQL, Apache, CVS
2532|Gigs was an open source php scheduling tool for bands and venues. The module plugs into existing websites. It supported a simple list of gigs, a calendar, pdf flier generation, an RSS feed, and some other stuff. Sourceforge page

Mini-projects