The projects on this page are ones that I worked on with Andrew for Yahoo’s HackU events at Georgia Tech.
The following are some of the projects I’ve contributed to, but as they were created in a 24-hour period (in the spirit of the hackathon event), most of these fall in the category of a “working prototype,” or at least they did when they were built. Some things may no longer work due to link rot or the depreciation of some of the APIs used to build them.
FlyBy
Yahoo+GTACM Hack Week 2009 project.
FlyBy is a social networking desktop application written in WPF that gives you control of what you see, from whom and when. With Twitter, it allows you to create lists of the people you’re following and use those lists to filter your Twitter feed, allowing you to view only the tweets that you want to see. (This was before Twitter natively supported lists and “muting” users.) The application was also meant to provide support for other social media sites such as Flickr and Facebook, and even let you drink from the firehose and get all of your social media updates on one screen, all at once.
Link: http://lamenta3.disavian.net/projects/flyby/
Lessons learned:
- Yahoos will take the mickey out of you for developing in .NET
- Building a Twitter desktop client more-or-less from scratch in 24 hours is HARD, especially if you’ve never done that sort of thing before.
- Trying to get multiple APIs and technologies to play nice with each other and not lock you out for making too many requests during testing is not something one should try to undertake ever in such a short timespan.
My contributions:
- Interface created using Microsoft Expression Blend 2. In two days, I learned the software and XAML well enough to create a mostly working interface.
- Some functionality concepts
- Icon design
Campus Map Mashup
Yahoo+GTACM Hack Week 2008 project.
Incorporates a number of additional information layers into the Georgia Tech campus map including bus tracking, bus stops, Wikipedia and crime. It also fixed a few bugs in the original map. Unfortunately, due in part to the fact that we had to reverse-engineer a couple of websites to get this to work in the first place, combined with some weird server configuration bugs that we could never work out, this project has not aged well and more-or-less no longer works.
Link: http://www.disavian.net/map
My contributions:
- Concept: At the time, a useful application that was a catch-all for useful navigation of campus did not exist. Andrew knew that he wanted to do something using the (at the time) beta version of the interactive campus map, but wasn’t quite sure what. We settled on the idea of making it even more interactive by adding additional information layers to it.
- Crime layer. The GTPD crime reports don’t have an RSS feed, so I had to create a dummy feed in XML to provide data for the layer. I also designed the marker graphics for the crime locations, which were color-coded depending on the nature of the crime. (2011 retrospective: This was before the ease of creating RSS feeds from any webpage using utilities like Feed43. Such things existed at the time, but they were either not free or very limited in their abilities. If I were to re-do this now, I would likely use this method to get the necessary data to populate this layer.)
