I’m a web developer, designer, and team builder.
I'm currently the director of engineering at CrossComm . I strive to be a participant in meaningful work with enjoyable teams.
I’m co-creator of open source educational tools Materia, Obojobo, and a side project HowTune.
A work in progress. The site is a registry for rare or limited vehicles. It will allow users to log sightings of other vehicles and claim their own vehicle’s page to add history about their own vehicles. The SyTy Registry is a non-profit organization that intends to collect and maintain a complete vehicle history of GMC Syclones and Typhoons.
Everything. I was contracted to build and design the site. It’s currently in the design phase, but I will be building and deploying the application.
A total re-imagining of Obojobo. We’re breaking the limits of the old system by creating a platform to create and host highly customizable programmable documents that allow authors to control how students flow through content, questions, and assessments in ways no other system allows. It does this while creating a huge amount of standardizes events that are exposed to researchers to study, hypothesize, and create new learning models. An open source project made possible by my work at the University of Central Florida.
Architect, devops, developer, designer, project manager. A pair of my co-workers did most of the early work while I was building GameServ. Eventually I joined the team to push toward a first official release. I build most of the server side PHP code, which ended up being a custom built PHP framework. I helped build a good amount of the Flash and Flex code, focusing mostly on the student interfaces while my partner focused on the instructor interfaces. This application is the cornerstone example that made the upper echelons of UCF realize our team’s capabilities and opened quite a few doors. Every student at UCF has gone through several learning objects in Obojobo at one point or another.
A modern shopping cart that specifically allows community members to easily run and manage group purchases. It’s ruthlessly simple for users to checkout, and we handle the complicated integrations with the payment processors. The most difficult portion of the project centers around allowing buyers to purchase at the starting rate, and refunding small bonuses as the rate drops due to more people buying in. The cart easily integrates with web forums, allowing their users to raise funds for new and innovative projects like custom exhausts without the burdens of using KickStarter.
Architect, devops, developer, designer, project manager. EnvyRate was my idea after running and seeing various group purchases run on community forums. I built about 2/3 of the application including the server side code, the front end code, and all of the deployment processes.
A Slack chat bot integration that adds fun chat tools, provides useful social and team features, and helps us empower staff.
Maintainer and developer. Hubot is a JavaScript application framework that can be connected to various chat applications. A student’s hack day project was to set up a HuBot installation and add some custom scripts to it. I maintain that application and built some very useful scripts for it. The one of the most proud of lets our developers have direct access to turning on development servers in AWS. This is access they normally wouldn’t have, but thanks to the AWS API and a simple Hubot script, they can. It reduces barriers without compromising security or safety.
A business critical, highly available and extraordinarily fault tolerant task running framework to move business data to our critical applications.
Architect, developer and maintainer. I was handed a poorly written ETL script from a previous employee. I reverse engineered the code, and crafted a task based framework around the tasks that code was executing. This broke up a single monolithic script riddled with problems into bite sized tasks with a dependency tree that allowed portions of the ETL process to fail without blocking the working portions. Cerebro changed these scripts from being a fragile liability, to a bullet proof service that was easily expanded by co-workers for other tasks. It’s been incredibly reliable. Maintenance and further development has been handed off to a co-worker.
Jenkins is an automated task runner. It’s often used in build and deployment pipelines to automate various tasks associated with building, testing, and deploying application software. We use it to do all of those things.
Infrastructure, developer, maintainer. I built the box, installed the software, figured out how to use it, and built many of the pipelines and processes in use for years. I created specialized pipelines that use AWS Lambda to trigger tests and deploys using GitHub webhooks. The webhook sends notifications to a Lambda relay that then sends those requests to our Jenkins API. In production deploys, Jenkins checks the signature of the commit against a known PGP key for whitelisted users, and only deploys if the user has been granted the ability to do so. This system makes deploys accessible to our developers without giving them access to the servers or other resources unless needed.
An automotive website that incentives collaborators to write how-to articles for repairs and upgrades to their cars. The site has specialized tools for writing step by step guides. It was designed to centralize all the know-how that ends up on community forums. Those forums are bought up by corporations who slather them with ads to make a profit off the content added by individuals. We thought those contributors should have a stake in the value their article generates.
Architect, devops, developer, designer, project manager. I created the original idea of the project, and did most of the work building, launching, promoting, and maintaining the site. I had a non-negligible amount of help from my parter, who mostly focused on building the JavaScript and a few content sections of the site. The site started in FuelPHP. It was later re-written in Ruby on Rails. From a technical standpoint, it’s engineered to be exceedingly cheap to run while supporting a lot of users. The site aggressively uses cache (varnish) including edge side includes to keep requests from ever touching Ruby. The custom built content editor, image editor, and various interfaces use React. The project has extensive unit test coverage and is automatically tested and deployed using CodeShip, GitHub, and Ansible. I also wrote over 130 how-to articles with 1+ million views on their own. This is a passion project that has taught me a lot about running a free service and trying to find a sustainable business model.
A simple educational website consolodating database concepts and termonology.
This was a weekend article idea turned into a single page site.
I wanted to take a deep dive into the various databases out there, and consolodate a lot of the basic terminology and uses to create a quick guide for anyone looking at what options exist.
Materia is a platform that serves interactive games and study tools to increase learner engagement in online courses. It enables K-12 school districts, universities, and large corporate organizations to deliver a library of customizable content we call “widgets”. Examples of widgets include image labeling, placing items in a sequence, and branching scenarios. Materia integrates with learning management systems like Instructure’s Canvas to enable new content, practice, and assessment capabilities. Its architecture reduces the cost and time needed to develop bespoke interactive content. Materia and a growing library of widgets are available now on Github at https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia.
Materia is comprised of several conceptual components: the Materia server, Materia widgets, and the Materia Widget Development Kit. This combination makes Materia the most complete solution of it’s kind to deliver interactive course content.
The Materia server handles everything needed to host and track widgets. This is where user authentication, LMS integrations, scoring, data storage, and reporting are handled.
Widgets consist of 3 custom interfaces: a creator, a player, and a score screen. Developers can create widgets that are customizable by content creators. For example, a crossword widget allows instructors to create custom puzzles. This structure allows fast development of new experiences without having to re-implementing the server’s capabilities. Widgets can be built using any browser technology for maximum flexibility. This allows developers to leverage existing expertise, again, reducing costs.
Finally, we’ve included the Materia Widget Development Kit to aid developers who make widgets. It speeds up development by eliminating the need to start a Materia server and reducing time between writing code and previewing changes.
As one of the largest universities in the United States, The University of Central Florida is known as a leader in quality digital learning, especially at scale. Materia contributes to our goals by increasing course quality in a sustainable way. Having started in 2005, we have commited over 14 years of fine-tuning and extending Materia’s capabilities. We welcome you to use Materia at your own organization, and we’re excited to collaborate on new endeavors. Learn more about Materia at https://ucfopen.github.io/Materia-Docs/.
Architect, devops, developer, designer, and project manager. I dreamed up this application early in my career at UCF. At the time, we were building individual interactive Flash files for faculty and just handing out the files. As the requirements increased, those flash files got more and more sophisticated. Eventually each one needed a customization WYSIWYG, a user authentication system, and a way to distribute them. It’s goal was to centralize those common features and build a platform that would allow faster widget creation. It’s gone through many upgrades and multiple re-branding over the years (formerly known as GameServ, then Kogneato, then renamed to Materia and Trademarked). It’s now a rather complex, load balanced, cached, and integrated into several other systems. We created over 60 widgets that are hosted on our install and continue to this day to evolve the code and service it provides. Most recently, we’ve open sourced the project and all of it’s widgets. No small feat as I had to search, scrub, and clean the git history for 30+ repositories, not to mention transition many of our processes from using Jenkins and Ansible to TravisCI. My role changed through the years from creating and coding it myself, to getting help from numerous team members, to relying heavily on my team to take ownership to one of many daily tasks. We’re now working toward building an open source community around the project.
A small company site for a high end custom car builder in Clearwater Florida. The site needed to be easitly updated to add photos of customer projects.
We built him a dynamic wordpress site with several custom plugins, and layouts to suite his needs.
Adam Ribakoff designed the site, I integrated the design into Wordpress and implemented all the custom features.
A quick prototype project for a friend. The idea was to build a quick little app that could be used to keep track of dog’s scores at his local fox hunting events.
With very few requirements, I built a Python/Django web app and a quirky, simple UI to keep track of a dog’s score from a phone with web access.
A last minute project from a friend, Universal Studios needed some tweaks to a Flash ad for the brand new “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter”.
Provided with all the existing ad, I modifified it and prepared it for distribution on Google’s DoubleClick platform.
A simple and quirky little site that showcases Catalyst’s surf board inventory online.
The site uses a trick combination of Dropbox and Excel to allow Catalyst to easily update content and prices.
I came up with the concept of using Drop Box and Excel to shortcut development and provide the client with an interface they were already familiar with. The client could simply add product to a spreadsheet that is synced to DropBox and the site’s content would automatically update.
Graphic design was handled by Adam Ribakoff.
A prototype app developed for Mobile Impact LLC. The app would be used by their pilots for keeping flight logs.
The iPad app was designed and coded by myself based on feature requests using AppCelerator Titanium in javascript.
A site developed for standing-mile racing community project.
I designed and built this site in Wordpress with heavy customization including plugins and custom post types. The project dissovled and was left incomplete.
3 times a year, I organized a multi-department Hack Day allowing individuals to learn, innovate, and explore new ideas.
Organizer, facilitator, designer. Inspired by Google’s 20% time, my team and I came up with several concepts of formalizing that time into an event. When the stars aligned with a new department lead I was given the task to execute a single day event, once per semester for our department. That started a long history of building actionable ideas that lead to innovative new projects and cross-team partnerships. It’s become a cornerstone to the success and culture of our growing team. After a few years - we started expanding to include other departments around campus, now it’s a big production with many stakeholders. https://medium.com/@iturgeon/inviting-innovation-500d8efa4342
An architectural firm’s website built to showcase their design and building expertise.
John Purdy Jr. (HHCP) designed the site, and I developed and implemented the site using modX.
Chronos was a small design experiment turned into a working prototype. It was a re-imagining of the paper timecards used for payroll processing and logging.
For some reason, my day job still fills out timecards manually via paper. Yeah.
Chronos was a prototype designed to work on mobile phones and desktops that aimed to reduce time tracking to a single input interface. It would store store your previous timecards in a centraly located database, and allow you to print a timecard without hassle.
Wekiva Island is a Florida outdoor event center located on the Wekiva River. They offer canoing, kayaking, and paddleboard rentals.
The center wanted a brand refresh that included a website overhaul using a design heavy, full screen interface.
The project was sub-contracted to me through John Purdy Jr.
I was provided a design concept to implement. Based on the requirements of a full screen interface with a custom UI elements and background music - I built the site using Adobe Flex. It included a customizable gallery and event calendar that read events stored on Google calendar.
It was a complex little project integrating quite a few technologies. The backend was used to retrieve calendar events and provide an api for flex to load gallery data.
Green Kraft provides alternative fuel trucks and engines for sale in the US. They need a new site including resources from their suppliers.
Adam and I shared responsibility designed and implementing the site.
Anvil Auto builds custom Carbon Fiber parts for classic muscle cars. They had a web store and shopping cart that was custom built in php by a previous developer. The cart fell into disrepair and needed some updates to work again.
I diagnosed the problems with their custom built PHP cart and got their site back up and running. From time to time, they needed additional technical support to update their site.
A car built by Bruning Auto Design, the E-Tikit Challenger site showcased all unique, custom built features of the car.
The site allowed Bruning to meet all the needs of their sponsors and spread news about the cars progress.
Adam Ribakoff designed the site and I chopped up the images and assembled everything into HTML and CSS. I built the site on top of ModX to allow the client to easily add and update some parts of the site and content. It wasn’t maintained and was eventually removed.
A car built by Bruning Auto Design, the E-Tikit Challenger site showcased all unique, custom built features of the car.
The site allowed Bruning to meet all the needs of their sponsors and spread news about the cars progress.
Adam Ribakoff designed the site and I chopped up the images and assembled everything into HTML and CSS. It was a fun little project for a really cool car
Another large web application for educational content. Obojobo is UCF’s realization of what a learning object is. It gave strict structure and size limitations in order to modularize learning content to make it highly reusable.
Note: There is another entry here for a ground-up rewrite known as Obojobo Next.
Architect, devops, developer, designer, project manager. A pair of my co-workers did most of the early work while I was building GameServ. Eventually I joined the team to push toward a first official release. I build most of the server side PHP code, which ended up being a custom built PHP framework. I helped build a good amount of the Flash and Flex code, focusing mostly on the student interfaces while my partner focused on the instructor interfaces. This application is the cornerstone example that made the upper echelons of UCF realize our team’s capabilities and opened quite a few doors. Every student at UCF has gone through several learning objects in Obojobo at one point or another.
An ambitious community hub aimed at providing a web portal for performance truck owners and enthusiasts.
Architect, developer, maintainer. My partner did the logo design and some layout design. I helped with the layout design, translated it to HTML, and integrated it into the various parts of the site using a custom templating system. I also installed all the 3rd party systems and integrated them by building custom plugins to allow users to single sign on between the applications. I also designed and built a few custom areas of the site that have dynamic content, including building and administration interface to update them.
Jeff Scott builds custom automitve parts as a side project in his spare time.
I helped Jeff out by designing several logos and a business card.
Johnson Hotrod Shop built an extreme, completely custom and ambitious Dodge Cuda project car. To fulfill commitments to their sponsors and help market the project, they needed a graphical website to showcase the car, build process, and sponsors. Hot Wheels even made a large scale model of this car, which sits on my shelf at home.
Adam Ribakoff designed the site and I chopped up the images and assembled everything into HTML and CSS. It was a fun little project for a really cool car
Helman Hurley Charvat Peacock (HHCP) is a large architectual firm based out of Orlando, Florida.
HHCP’s website, designed and managed by John Purdy Jr, has always had a lot to live up to. The company is responsible for huge, design driven projects around the globe - and their site needs to both convey the company’s culture, ambition, and acheivments.
While I was provided most graphics and design by HHCP, I had to implement them and add UI interactions. The site features a catalog of their projects. Built in Flash, and predating modern web API’s, I had to architect and implement a way to store, serve, and modify the list of projects in a workable fashion.
I ended up building a backend in PHP and MySQL that would store data uploaded via an Adobe Flex management interface. The database would then feed an dynamic XML document built in PHP which was loaded via Flash in the browser.
This complex implementation allowed HHCP to update their project list and use an application to view, sort, and search for projects.
Race Proven Motors built custom modifications for Syclones and Typhoons.
Adam Ribakoff designed the layout and I integrated osCommerce into the design and function of the site.
A Flash based, on-line tour of the university. The tour heavily used Flash animations, Flash navigation, videos, photos, a talking tour guide, and a stylized map.
Developer and designer. This was the first big project for the New Media Team. UCF needed a virtual tour, and the New Media team stepped up with a Flash enhanced site that not only won accolades, but received an award from CampusTours.com. The site consists of 3 versions for accessibility reasons. I helped create the original intro animations, tour guide intro animation, navigation JavaScript for the HTML1 version, and completed filling in the content. When the tour was updated in 2002, I completely re-wrote the code for each part of the site. The map would then interact with the different frames using an undocumented Flash function that I researched and discovered. This function allowed the tour to work under nearly every browser and operating system, where it was limited to windows machines before. I also focused heavily on decreasing file sizes and optimizing the code. The map itself was optimized and is now less than 20% of its original size, and it features a cleaner look with faster animation. I also streamlined update requirements for the Flash version, and headed the organization and upload of all the files.
Redline Xtreme was (now defunct) a Tampa Bay area stunt motorcycle team.
They had just produced “Southern Chaos”, a film filled with various motorcycle stunts and events. They wanted a website to futher their team’s brand and to sell merchandise with an online shopping cart.
I designed, developed, and built a completely custom shopping cart using PHP and MySQL. I designed a graphic heavy site using many photos from their stunt events and videos.
A Flash and HTML site built for a local custom motorcyle builder, Lake County Choppers. Their most famous project was their Corona Cigar Bike.
The site’s design featured animated tribal art used on their bikes.
I did everything. Met with the client, designed the site, and deployed to the web.
MotoRex was the company behind legally importing Nissan Skyline GTR’s into the US in the 90’s and early 2000’s. I was a team of 2 who designed, built, and maintained the company’s website starting in 2001. We redesigned it in 2003, and continued maintenance till the company famously imploded in 2006.
The site was consistent with current trends in 2001 - a table based graphical layout with no thought to accessibility. You can see the site on the Internet Archive
My partner Adam Ribakoff and I shared tasks pretty evenly. He takes credit for the original layout design and much of the client interaction and daily design work. I implemented much of the layout and architecture of the site, though certainly contributed to design work myself.
The company Adam Ribakoff and I formed to formally build websites for clients. We started purely as a automitive website design company. It expanded to include print design and eventually but to more general web application development work.
As a managing member, I handle the logistics of the company and hold the title of CTO. I handle the legal work required to establish the company, manage the company’s money, taxes, and filing various licenses etc. I’m also the majority owner and primary developer.
Through the years, we’ve partnered with some freelancers and even taken on a 3rd managing member to undertake a signifigant new development project - HowTune.com
The work we do uner Rev-in has always been considered semi-serious side projects.
Personal site for writing and posting articles pertaining to this unique vehicle’s maintenance and upgrades. The site also allowed users to upload vehicle profiles and share comments.
Architect, designer, developer, and maintainer. Being my first large project, this website was significant in my learning of server side application development. I had very limited knowledge with programing or database design prior to this project. I studied examples and documentation to create systems for page templates, user logins, article commenting, vehicle profiles and a link tracking. This same site later integrated with the Group Purchase and a mirrored F.A.Q. maintained on an external site. The site averaged 12,840 hits daily with a total of 4,526,762 hits between August 2002 and July 2003. I created, edited and published all of the graphics on the site with exception of user submitted images.