Summer Intern Project at MITRE Corporation 2013

My project for my summer internship at MITRE was for the Air Force in personnel recovery, and as such I can't display it here. However, I can say that I took on the whole design and implementation of the user interface for the time I was on the project. I used Twitter Bootstrap 2.3 and jQuery on top of a Sinatra backend to create an interactive prototype that the core backend developer has since started layering on top of his work. I also used CouchDB and HTML5 LocalStorage for persistence.

For one part of the project, I took a 3 page PDF form and an ugly old UI from the current system and transformed them into a smooth, usable mult-page form. I worked through the complete process of design from start to finish. I began on paper and moved to static HTML. Then I divided up the HTML into templates and integrated interactivity. I saught out users within MITRE, asked them to test the system and provide feedback. Finally, I made many of the suggested improvements.

This project was a valuable learning experience. I learned javascript, jQuery, Sinatra, CouchDB, and Bootstrap. I was able to put into practice the design processes I'd learned at school and got an insiders look at what it is like to work on a military-sponsored project.

Facebook++

My web engineering class was challenged to create a web application using C#.NET that included basic Facebook integration, a chat room, stock tracking and calendar functionality. It was quite a challenge for ~10 weeks and teammates with varied backgrounds in web design. I only knew HTML and CSS like 2 of my other teammates. Lucky for us the remaining two members knew their stuff!

I focused mainly on the front end. I helped design each of the different screens and built part of the homepage with the Facebook features and the entire calendar portion. I wrote a lot of HTML/Razor code along with the corresponding CSS. This project also was my first introduction to jQuery/Javascript and Twitter Bootstrap.

This was probably the hardest project I've done for school, but it is also likely, the most fun I've had on a project. I was on a crack team that was determined to kick butt and were successful at it. This project is posted on my BitBucket page.

Fleet Dispatch Application

As an intern at Fidelity Investments during summer 2012, I laid the groundwork for a update fleet dispatch system for Boston Coach. I spent the summer learning about the design principles for iOS and Android and researching the different ways the team I was on could approach the project once it really got started. As a part of this effort, I created a variety of flow diagrams and mock-ups for my designs as well as a document that detailed my findings and explained my designs for each device, including iPhone, iPad, and both Android phones and tablets. Sadly, I cannot post those mock-ups here as I do not have copies of them and they are the intellectual property of Fidelity Institutional.

Interactive Classroom

The Interactive Classroom is the classroom of the future! Attend class from anywhere and from any device with a screen, a browser, and keyboard input!

...Or so the advertisement would go. This application is suppose to be a totally platform independent remote classroom. Think Google Docs meets Adobe Connect. It has features like sharing presentations, a virtual white board with an array of drawing tools, video feed of the professor, chat, and the ability to raise your hand. Interactive Classroom allows you to do anything you would normally do in a physical classroom and is suitable for most high school and college level courses.

This project was for the class Human-Computer Interaction 2: Design of User Interfaces. I was apart of a 3-person team where I acted as the design lead. All of the layouts, icons, etc are my work. My teammates were in charge of coding the prototype and documentation. Click here to see the prototype. It is a Flash application so it will not work on all devices as we originally intended. We would have built the program in HTML5 and Javascript if we'd had more time, but Flash served us well enough for the purpose of the course. All the credit for the Flash app goes to Peter Kostraba.

Images of my original designs will follow soon. Pete did a fantastic job making the prototype look like the original design, but the images are a bit cleaner.

JBrick for iOS

JBrick for iOS is a iPad application that allows the user to program Lego Mindstorms robots using a drag-and-drop editor. Right now the project is in the early design phases, so all we have is a prototype with a text-based UI and some whiteboard drawings. Moving forward I will be doing the graphics for the project. My teammate and I have already worked out the layout and feature set. Check out our repository on Google Code.

Pizza Delivery System

The pizza delivery system was a class project for my first software engineering class my second year of college. It's a fairly generic project, but I am still very proud of the work I did.

I designed and built the entire front end of the system. This was done using Java Swing, which is not the easiest framework to work with as far as UI frameworks are concerned. I tried really hard to get a solid composition and sense of negative versus positive space. The only major downfall of the UI is that all the sizing of elements is hard coded so it is not scalable.

You can download the runnable jar here.