2 come to mind.
While consulting in college, I was contracted by Lexico for reference.com to write a wikipedia markup translator. The budget was small but it was one of my first big contract gigs. In the course of a loooong week, I put together a regular expression based PHP script with a small recursive descent parser for a couple edge cases. Of course this was before anyone really wrote unit tests, etc. I believe Reference.com used that for 10 years with only minor changes to support new syntax.
A few years ago, my neighbor received a 3M innovation grant in partnership with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He recruited an electrical engineer, a material scientist, and me (computer scientist). Between all of us, we developed a handheld device with a neo-pixel compass head that would navigate you through the museum and lead you to artwork you like. This involved using wifi triangulation and building a node map of every room in the museum. My key involvement was building recommendation system, which was a standalone cloud microservice that took in preference data (thumbs up/down buttons on the device) and using association rule mining to tell the hardware service which piece of artwork to lead you to next. I loved this project because I utilized more of my Computer Science degree. I also loved interfacing with hardware. This was pre IOT boom and it seemed all like magic getting custom built hardware to talk with cloud systems I put together. We also submitted the project to a scientific journal. At the time, it was such a departure from the dev lead role at a SaaS company and I really really enjoyed it.
I'm happy to be working on Auxilium. Solving a problem as large as emergency reporting is very important to me. By notifying other users around you about an emergency, it can help save lives.
Bolaji Ayodeji
Software Engineer, Teacher, and Developer Advocate.
Gergely Polonkai
You have to believe in things that are not true. How else would they become?
Is this the time for shameless plugs? Whoa, this is a time for shameless plugs! Then let me introduce you
AstroGNOME
This is an astrologers’ sofware for the GNOME Desktop. Back when i started writing it, there were no free, usable software for astrology. So i took Astrodiest’s Swiss Ephemeris (SWE) library, wrapped it in a few GLib objects within the SWE-GLib library (also written by myself), and wrote AstroGNOME to display the data calculated by SWE.
After the planet positions are calculated i convert the data to XML, and with an XSL template i convert the whole thing into an SVG image. The XSL trick is needed so i can add multiple chart themes: each theme is an XSL template which can transform the really simple chart XML to the SVG image displayed by the renderer.
Unfortunately i don’t have enough time to develop this further, even though i have lots of plans. The graphics are really bad since i’m no designer by any means. The software itself is buggy, but used to work (i have no idea if it even compiles in its current state).
So that’s it. I’m really proud of what i wrote back a few (6-7) years ago, and i’m really sad i don’t have time to move it forward yet. Let’s hope i will soon.