Ryan Freebern

, ryan@freebern.org, (603) 359-5262; Plainfield, NH

This is my portfolio of past projects, demonstrating various aspects of my UI design, HTML, CSS, Flash, PHP and Perl work. I've annotated each project to explain the project's details, my role, and the results. Dates given are completion or launch dates.

My résumé is available.

Upper Valley Food Homepage Redesign

, freelance, June 2008

I was hired by a small local firm to do a full redesign of the homepage of their newest website, http://uvfood.com, an index of local restaurants and other food-related businesses. I created a polished mockup and, after approval, built layout images and cross-platform XHTML and CSS. The new design was successfully deployed a week after work began.

Intellectual Property Database

, Army Game Project, Summer 2007

I was tasked to independently design, implement, test, and launch an internal web application to allow the Army Game Project's legal team to catalog all of the project's intellectual property documents. As the sole person on the task, I built an MVC system in PHP for the backend and designed and created an HTML/CSS/Javascript user interface. The application handles adding, editing, and deleting four different types of data records, as well as adding related records or files to each record. A powerful search is also provided. (The images show test data.)

Press Material Website

, Army Game Project, Fall 2006

The previous version of the press website required the project's marketing people to send all press material to the web team, who would update the site's HTML by hand to incorporate it. When I took over the project as software engineer and developer, I set out to make this a less onerous chore. The system I built allows the marketing people to easily add, edit, and delete text, images, and document files by themselves (with thumbnails generated automatically).

Event Support Site

, Army Game Project, Spring 2006

One of my first tasks after joining the project was to take over as developer on the Event Support Site, a site that assisted people in planning videogaming events such as LAN parties that involved the America's Army videogame. While I had little control over the site design, I did my best to improve what I could by converting the design company's table-based layout into a more cleanly-degrading XHTML/CSS layout. The site now supports thousands of users scheduling and running dozens to hundreds of gaming events every month.

IRC Services Modifications

, Army Game Project, Spring 2004

Before I became a full-time contract employee for the Army Game Project, they asked me to do some work on their IRC systems. I ended up doing two separate tasks: the first was a set of Perl scripts to gather and summarize usage statistics from their IRC network and present the data as XML for consumption as a web service, and the second was a set of compiled modules written in C for the open-source Anope IRC services that allowed IRC operators to set up cron-like scheduled commands to be automatically run on the network. For 8 months in 2007 and 2008 I was the system administrator for the America's Army IRC network and services.

URL Log

, personal project, Summer 2006

The URL Log is a private del.icio.us-style enhanced community bookmark system that I, along with two other friends, built in Perl, HTML, CSS, and Javascript using SQLite and Firefox in the backend. It downloads and caches local copies of all URLs logged, generates a full-text searchable index and a thumbnail of the page or file at the URL, and supports tagging and searching by submitter, date, tag, or keyword.

qumbler

, personal project, January 2007

qumbler is a tumblelog that pulls entries tagged public from the URL Log (above) and presents them in a simple blog format. I wrote it over the course of two weeks in Perl with an HTML/CSS frontend. It supports searching by keyword, tag or author and provides RSS feeds of all entries or on a per-tag or per-author basis. Links to YouTube videos are automatically converted into embedded Flash objects, and links to images are automatically converted to downsized local copies of the images.

Endurance Assessment Tool

, U.S. Coast Guard R&D, Fall 2003

One of the Flash-based tools I created while working for the Crew Endurance research team at the U.S. Coast Guard R&D Center was this colorful and friendly risk factor assessment tool, aimed at people with little to no knowledge of computers. The interface was designed to be attractive and simple to use, and the resulting assessment was used to help tune work schedules and workloads to minimize exhaustion-related mishaps. The tool is used throughout the Coast Guard and within the commercial maritime industry as well.

Crew Endurance Training Tool

, U.S. Coast Guard R&D, Summer 2004

Another Flash-based crew endurance tool, this was intended to be used by a presenter in training classes. My instructions were to construct something that was more eye-catching than a PowerPoint, provided more opportunities for interaction, and could be easily modified or extended in the future. I built this presentation in Flash and designed it so that other Flash movies could easily be embedded on the various slides, to add interactivity or just animation. It was well-received by all trainees.

worksafer

, personal project, Winter 2005

worksafer is a Firefox extension that tries to help ensure its users don't accidentally stumble onto a page that's "not safe for work," whether due to pornography, loud noises, disgusting imagery, or whatever. The system works based on unmoderated community voting, and allows its users to decide just how "safe" they want to be while surfing. Worksafer uses Perl, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and MySQL.

Monday, June 16, 2008