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Portfolio of Work

Below are a few of the professional projects I've been involved in over the years.

Static Websites

RI Higher Education Assistance Authority

Upon taking my current position, I was charged with redesigning the RIHEAA website. The existing site was done using Microsoft Frontpage, was poorly organized, and it was difficult to locate content. Most of the content had been gleaned from printed manuals, handbooks, and publications. I immediately took on the task of reorganizing the content, redesigning the interface, and assuring that the new site met accessibility requirements as prescribed by the W3C. The resulting site was a user-centric design (i.e. "Who are you" vs. "What do you want to find"). In retrospect, it is time to move to a content-centric design in order to flatten the menu system, but the existing site has served us well and has gone from a few hits per day to to a few thousand hits per day.

5&10 Matching Grant Program

One of RIHEAA's financial aid assistance programs is the 5&10 Matching Grant program. Most of the marketing materials for this program are developed by a third-party company. I was asked to do a website that captured the same look and feel as the print materials.

Web Applications

CooksIllustrated.com

While working for America's Test Kitchen, I was the primary developer and system architect responsible for the companion site to Cook's Illustrated Magazine. The CooksIllustrated.com website is a paid membership site that gives members access to nearly 20 years of recipes from Cook's Illustrated Magazine's print edition. All of the recipes reside in a home-grown database that allows the site to cross-reference equipment ratings, ingredients, related articles, and other granular metadata on the fly.

During my time at ATK, I oversaw the implementation of a major redesign done by a third-party design firm to make the site more user-friendly and add web video as an extra that goes above and beyond what can be presented in the paper edition of the magazine. I also oversaw and managed a full PCI audit for the credit card industry and the transition of the membership billing and maintenance systems to a third-party partner.

  • Link To: CooksIllustrated.com
  • Screenshots of the site as it looked when I was there are coming soon. The visual appearance has changed but the functionality is still much the same.

CooksCountry.com

Cook's Country is a second magazine published by America's Test Kitchen. The same projects and duties apply to this website as those listed above for Cook's Illustrated.

AmericasTestKitchen.com

AmericasTestKitchen.com is the companion site to the America's Test Kitchen PBS television cooking show. The site offers free recipes from the last two seasons of the show and served as a marketing upsell to the paid subscription sites for Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country. I was responsible for this site in the same way I was responsible for the other two ATK sites except there was no billing involved.

Customization of Google Search Appliance Results

While at America's Test Kitchen, I was asked to find a way to customize the Google Search Appliance to return recipe data from our homegrown content system in a way that made more sense, produced better results, and more user friendly. Working with two co-workers, we determined how to get the search appliance to return XML that we could parse and display the way we wanted, filtering by categories that are relevant to a recipe search.

RIHEAA Scholarship & Grant System

One of the first projects I was involved with at RI Higher Education Assistance Authority (RIHEAA) was to serve as the technical lead and assistant project manager for development of a web-based system to administer the Rhode Island State Education Grant. While the system itself was developed by third-party consultants, I developed the authentication module and oversaw the design process for the entire system. I continue to oversee the maintenance and enhancement phase of the project. The system contains a module for Financial Aid Officers to verify student awards and request paymeent and a module for students to accept their awards online.

Training Registration Application (aka "TrainReg")

While at WPI, I was involved in developing a web-based training sign-up engine. The system contained an external interface for the end-users to sign-up for classes and a back-end "internal" interface for the instructors to manage course offerings, registrations, and attendence rosters. The system was written in Perl and is currently being rewritten and expanded to provide more robust services.

Off-Campus Housing Apartment Finder

While at WPI, I also wrote an application to assist students in finding off-campus housing. There existed an antiquated system to perform this function on the unix command-line. After a full requirements gathering process, I designed and implemented a system in Perl for the students to search and the administrative assistants to add and manage the listings. The system contained such robust features as "hide listing", "create listing like this one", etc. to minimize administrative work. This system still exists as written.

Print Designs

Financial Aid Handbook

One of RIHEAA's primary annual print publications is the Financial Aid Handbook. The handbook is distributed to every high school in Rhode Island as a tool that they can use to coach students through the financial aid process. It has an approximate paper circulation of 20,000 and a PDF of the document is made available via the web. The PDF version received approximately 1,297 hits during 2005-2006 academic year, bringing total circulation to 21,297.

My role in the handbook was to re-design the cover and internal layout. The new layout included better visual clues to the way information was grouped, a more consistent look and feel, and better use of spot-color.

Code Examples

File Conversion and Email Script

Most code that I've written is property of the organization for which it was written. Below is a small snippet of PHP code for an internal script I wrote to convert a file format from CSV to fixed-width and then email it to a set of users as an attachment. As is noted in the comments, particular attention wasn't paid to security because this application was to be used internally and the risk was low. Nonetheless, the code shows briefly what I am capable of.