Staticpulse

Born in Boston in 1986 (I hear the Celtics were good that year. Red Sox too… until a few things happened near the end). “Formative” years spent in New Jersey (high school in Manasquan & a B.S. in Information Technology from Rutgers); late 2008 saw me going international. First London (a Masters in International Relations from Hult), then Poland (assisting my partner with her PhD in the Słupsk area), followed by Venezuela (starting my business in Porlamar on the island of Margarita. Yes, it’s as tropical as it sounds).

I ended up moving to Brooklyn, NY (not the part that all the other designers and hipsters live in), and I’m here for the long haul. If you’re in the area (or want me to help make your website easier to use for you and your clients), .

Teacher Hub — Programming & Design | 2010 – present

In early 2010, I was approached by a dear friend with a proposal. His wife, a newly minted New Jersey Public School teacher, found herself a predicament which would manifest itself within the next few months. All of her classroom purchases were now obsolete, as she had been reassigned for the following school year. In addition, she was looking for services that would introduce her to other teachers and their ideas about classroom arrangement, lesson plans, and teaching concepts for the grade she was reassigned to.

While there are myriad teacher sites/portals/forums/shops out there, none of them had any sense of design, proportion, or information architecture (see: a-to-z teacher stuff, teachers.net, sprout classrooms…). So we decided to make our own Teacher Hub, a place for teachers to buy and sell their wares, share ideas, sell their services as consultants, and anything else they want to do (in an easy-to-understand interface, to boot!).

I designed & programmed this entire site using Ruby on Rails 3, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript (jQuery), and inspiration-drawing. Feel free to view the acknowledgements section of Teacher Hub to find out where I drew inspiration from.

I also manage all hosting (VPS @ Media Temple) for Teacher Hub. The site is hosted using Apache with Phusion Passenger as the Ruby on Rails module. All deployments are managed by custom Capistrano recipes which pull from our private Subversion server and send update information to our Basecamp project for historical reference. Although ORM (ActiveRecord) makes database work much easier, my knowledge of administering and querying MySQL was crucial in getting the project developed quickly.

NetEvents TV — Programming, Server Management | 2009 – present

While studying in London, I was introduced to the CEO of NetEvents Int’l. He had recently launched a venture to capture the essence of the many events he curates each year, encompassing the latest networking technologies and concepts put forward by some of the brightest minds in these times.

This venture is NetEvents TV, where you can watch videos of interviews with network technology firm executives, engineers, & directors as well as live coverage of the events NetEvents puts on throughout the year and the occasional documentary (such as this history of ethernet narrated by its creator, Bob Metcalfe).

I manage this site by coding in C#, building new ASP.NET admin/CMS systems for a formerly completely-SQL-controlled (MSSQL) site with no administration site. I also encode video as well as embed multi-language captions in both embedded FLV files (using Captionate) as well as the W3C timed text XML format.

Fairgift Ltd. — Programming | 2009 – present

While working at a previous agency, I was assigned to this site as a “maintainer.” I was soon informed that my duties included not only maintaining the site, but fixing glaring bugs littered throughout this e-commerce and gift registry site. Did I mention that the site is actually two pre-compiled ASP.NET web applications? And that the administration site is built in PHP, with no function/object sharing between admin & user-facing sections? Two completely separate codebases working on the same database. Yikes.

Despite the issues, it’s a treat to work on the site because I believe it is filling a need. They deal exclusively in Fair Trade products, trading directly with the producers (which you can find out more about on their meet the producers page) so that you know your purchases and registry listings benefit artisans with minimal intervention.

This site is built using ASP.NET & PHP, using MySQL as the data store. I’ve built an AJAX-powered stock management tool which uploads and parses CSVs given to them by their order fulfillment warehouse to keep their admin system and warehouse system in sync. I also manage Fairgift’s Subversion servers to keep their code in check.

Interactive World War II Casualties Chart — Programming & Design | 2008

During my final year at Rutgers, I took my first course in Information Visualization. I had known for a while that I loved beautiful design, but who knew there was a discipline which could guide you through all the techniques, skills, and requirements to make that idea in your head into a logical, cohesive, and data-dense piece of art? I was floored (my professor and Edward Tufte were the primary catalysts here).

As my final project, I decided to use my web skills and build a successor to my World War I chart (directly below), an interactive chart displaying the vast discrepancies between reported casualties by the various sources which exist on the topic (militaries, historians, encyclopedias, etc.). Go ahead, open it.

I built this interactive chart using HTML, CSS, and jQuery. The site uses the less-common horizontal scrolling style, which may not feel natural, but does give you a precise alignment between all charts for much easier comparison.

World War I Casualties Chart — Design | 2008

Combining my fascination with modern war history and my class requirements to design a data visualization with emphasis on clarity, data density, and practicality (this wasn’t a history class, after all), I endeavored to create a chart which portrayed a paradox common in histories from the ancient past to the modern day: statistical margin of error in war reporting. Since my gut feeling was that this explanation would bore the pants off of most of my classmates (and any other non-historians looking at the chart), I went about it in a way that would perhaps spark the interest of a casual viewer. I made the point of highlighting the extreme.

In this case, the extreme translated to “How could so many people report the number of casualties so vastly differently than others?”

I built this chart using Omnigraffle and extensive research into the different sources of casualty numbers reported for World War I.

Rutgers OIRAP — Programming | 2006 – 2007

In need of an internship or job during the summer of 2007, I was introduced to the technical head of Rutgers’ Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning and secured an interview with him just before the end of the spring semester. The interview led to an offer to join as a programmer on their faculty CV management team.

With over 3000 faculty, there is a lot of knowledge holed up in New Brunswick, Camden, & Newark, but the common reference material for that knowledge — the CV — is often a very computer-unfriendly medium when searching for expertise in a field. Word documents, PDFs, Mathematica-generated images [and though I can’t remember the name now, some programming/layout language that lets you output to PDF that the engineering faculty was gaga about]; they all made media relations and other faculty-search needs almost impossible to fulfill.

So we built a new way to store CVs, which was quite unpopular (though thankfully it wasn’t my job to convince people of the obvious benefits to such a program).

This was my first large-scale deployment of an ASP.NET site. My tasks were to bug-test previously written code and write new code across the spectrum of technologies we adopted, including the aforementioned programming language as well as HTML, CSS, and large doses of Javascript/AJAX (some using jQuery, but plenty written from scratch).

The Pine — Coding/Layout/Design | 2006 – 2007

In 2003, I went to my first basement show in New Brunswick. The Pine played, and my life changed (I don’t give The Pine all the credit, though…). Eventually Roger (singer and guitarist) and I began a casual correspondence (pen pals?), and when the Pine came to the east coast a second time, I hosted them (with the help of my best friends and roommates) during their NY/NJ stay. Eventually the subject of websites (my specialty) came up.

Roger’s distinctive art style was a primary component of all of his band's releases, and we wanted to keep that aesthetic on the web as well. So we went the most literal way possible: Roger drew the website on paper, and I made it digital.

Using Roger’s drawings as a blueprint, I scanned and converted them all into rasterized graphics with transparency. I then cut them up where necessary and glued the pieces together using HTML, CSS, and pre-jQuery Javascript to create a faux-fabric “window” into the various sections of the site.

Staticpulse — Coding/Layout/Design | 2002 – Present

Staticpulse was a name I thought was cool in high school. Over the years it’s been a place for me to write, design, and experiment with programming.

This incarnation of Staticpulse was built by hand, using jQuery for Javascript and HTML5 Boilerplate & Blueprint as my CSS defaults.

Sunflowers (book) — Writing/Design/Layout/Photography | 2008 – Present

I took a wonderful trip in the summer of 2006. It was the kind of trip that in the years since, every time I encounter one of my friends who accompanied me on it, the trip comes up. Inevitably. And with incredible nostalgia.

So when I found myself in September 2008 in London with no job and waiting for a January semester to begin, I found myself a new calling: author. And after writing a few pages of a rough draft on those tiny pocket moleskine cahiers, I realized that I wanted to relive the trip in journal form. Instead of treating it as a memoir, I wanted to treat it as if I had actually written a journal on the trip.

The overall design aesthetic is of a scrapbook with a grid. Photos are digitally “pasted” next to the torn-out journal pages against a soft beige background. It’s a large-format book, and pages contain fewer words than the average paperback, giving the feeling of a coffee table book that can be picked up and put down without guilt. The large photographs also contribute to that feeling, as well as giving a strong visual incentive to pick it up or leave it out for easy access.

I also run a blog keeping track of the quirks and common aspects of writing a book that I imagine most people would not be aware of, as happened to me when I began to write and lay out my book.

Rutgers — TA in “Web Design With XML Technologies” class | Summer 2008

After I graduated, I had a summer to burn since I knew I would be in London come the fall. Not wanting to settle for the typical “temp” jobs, I took a look at my alma mater’s class schedule and found a course that I would personally want to take and which was taught by one of my favorite professors. So I sent her a letter asking if I could join the class as a teaching assistant. They promised me nothing more than an honorarium (my first, so I was unaware of the humble nature of honorariums), but I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to pick up some teaching skills, learn a few tricks with XML that I hadn’d discovered yet, and make some great contacts.

It was a little weird at first, since I was acting as an assistant in a class full of all my former peers, but the overall experience was positive. I got what I had wanted out of it, and kept my web skills up-to-date, and had a great summer session without all that stress of being the one who’s actually getting graded!