Posts

The Code Sample Dilemma

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Closed Source Means No Source Having worked more than full-time on private projects for years means I had very little time for my own passion projects. This ultimately ends up leaving me with very little that I could use to showcase my knowledge. Although this is something that I wish I would have made more time for, I don't regret all of the effort and collaboration that I put into making all of the work products and projects that I worked on a success. A Little Music In the absence of a large selection of open source contributions, the next best thing is a Sample App of sorts. The idea is that it will contain a decent sampling of my knowledge and ability to create web applications. The sample application utilizes the open source music database  musicbrainz.org , PHP framework  Symfony , Bootstrap, and a little React. Visit the Showcase - http://showcase.eight9.net/ Browse around and search for some Albums by artist or album name. The source is available on  GitHub , som
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Online Testing - Student Assessments

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Phase 2 After getting the Itembank application running for a few months and any major bugs worked out I was ready for my second large project. Add a new student Online Testing feature to our DnA product offering. Due to the obvious need for scalability and a very specific user workflow, I chose to create this as a separate standalone application utilizing a scalable NoSQL database solution. Users would design their assessments in our Itembank application, schedule them in our DnA application, and students would login to our Portal application to see their assigned assessments. Clicking the assessment uses an SSO mechanism to log the student into the OT application and serves up the assessment. Once a student test is completed, a scoring & processing daemon picks up the record and sends scores to DnA for reporting purposes. The screenshots below show a more recent evolution of the application that involved a number of developers and several years of revisions. Student Online Tes
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Itembank - Item & Test Creation

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The Beginning For one of my first projects at Illuminate Education, I was tasked with creating a stand-alone application to allow our users to author their own items (test questions, correct answers, and metadata), as well as create assessments using these items. For the first version of the Itembank, I also created the ability to generate a PDF Test Booklet of the assessment. This would allow it to be taken via a paper scansheet using existing functionality within the main data and assessment system. The screenshots below show a more recent evolution of the application that involved a number of developers and several years of revisions. Assessment View: Item Creation: Test Booklet:
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You Said It! - An iOS Sticker App

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Just for fun. A few years ago, my wife and I were playing around with the newly created iOS Stickers feature in iMessage. Having a hard time finding some stickers, she suggested "We should make our own stickers". So we spent several nights and weekends making a fun project out of it. She worked on making all the SVG images, and I worked on creating the stickers app. Though the revenue doesn't quiet come close to covering the cost of the Apple Dev license, it was indeed worth the cost for the chance experiment and mess around with Swift, the App Store ecosystem, as well as work on the project together. App Store  |  Website - http://yousaidit.eight9.net/
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