Project Portfolio

• Scottish Construction Guide — a database of organisations involved in the construction industry in Scotland, including a Google Map of the entries and a full search facility, written purely in Javascript since the client was concerned about the availability of server-side programming facilities. Once moved to more advanced hosting, I replicated the site across two servers, moving the data into a MySQL cluster and implementing AJAX request logging.

• Enterprise Gym — a web application I created for the University of Dundee’s award-winning Enterprise Gym, a society set up to promote entrepreneurship among the students. Members can register online, see a diary of upcoming events and sign up for these events (getting SMS reminders of events they have signed up for), automatically earning points for doing so as well as for completing online quizzes to measure their understanding of the business world. With over 1,000 registered members in its fourth year of operation, the site is now in the process of being handed over to be operated entirely by student members.

• SUE-MoT conference 2007 – I helped organise a conference on sustainability in Glasgow, Scotland in June 2007, building and hosting the associated websites and graphic design along with a colleague. I produced and indexed the book of abstracts, then we released the full papers online as well, originally with password protection — since removed — to allow only conference delegates to access the papers. The book of abstracts – typeset and indexed using Perl and LaTeX, with graphics from InDesign and Illustrator – was well-received; the book of proceedings was less successful, partly because the graphics embedded in at least one paper had been corrupted and took over three months to replace! Because of this, the papers were simply converted to PDF for upload, without further processing for consistency.

• Sudoku — a simple web-based game of Sudoku, well suited for playing on the iPhone, featuring automatically generated grids which can always be solved. There are several unusual features, including the ability to enter a shortlist of possible answers in a cell and to save your current game as a URL incorporating your grid, also allowing you to share grids by e-mail.

• Miscellaneous software — over the years, I’ve written many small tools to suit particular needs. A few of these are already on this site, including TFind and Bin2H — there are others already written which I hope to upload soon, as well as further developments planned.