Development

I first started programming as a hobby when I was 14 years old — the year was 1996, the language was Visual Basic 3.0, and the OS was Windows 3.1. Through my college Computer Science education, internship, years of professional development experience, and many independent projects over the years, I have come to be proficient with a vast number of languages, technologies, and skills. These days I use PHP, Java, Python, and JavaScript the most frequent, but dabble in just about everything. As technology is an ever-changing field, I work to continue acquiring new skills on a regular basis. I really enjoy making things and so it is always fun to learn new technologies to add to my toolbox.

Much of my professional work has centered around search, recommendations, ETL scripts, data validation, unit testing (with continuous integration) for server-side code bases, and also front-end/UX optimizations via JavaScript. A detailed listing of software engineering projects I have done through employment is available on my LinkedIn profile. What I have listed below are some of the projects I have started or participated in on my own time.

Open Source Contributions

Kana Tools for Java

A small one-stop-shopping library to make life easier when dealing with Japanese text in Java. It handles many different types of conversions on text containing hiragana, katakana, roma-ji, as well as character-width (zenkaku "full-width" and hankaku "half-width") adjustments. PHP conveniently comes with this functionality built-in, but no workable best practice in Java exists for this type of processing, so I created this library to fill that void.

Flickr Geocoding Bookmarklet

As the photography page will let you know, I love Flickr and its API. However, since the vast majority of my photos are taken in Japan, I have always had some difficulty geotagging photos on the Flickr website because they show the Yahoo US map of Japan which is of very poor quality and low detail. This small script, which can be bookmarked and called from any Flickr photo page, allows a user to geotag a given Flickr photo with the extreme accuracy of Google Maps, which when fully zoomed in offers an amazing level of detail.

JSON Cat

Output the content of JSON data files to the Linux command line (similar to the cat command) in a pretty, human-readable format — available in multiple langauges!

Good Grep

A small convenient Bash wrapper for grep that I use practically every day

OpenOffice Bibliographic

Did some initial development for this project as my Capstone Project in college. I worked on the backend of a MODS (XML schema developed by the US Library of Congress) storage API in C++ for a plugin to make it easier for academics to manage citations used in papers written in OpenOffice. Unfortunately, this project (OOoBib, as it was known) is now defunct.

Cool Websites I've Made

The Mie Guidebook

A comprehensive resource for English-speakers living in Mie Prefecture to thrive during their stay there. I was not only in charge of this service in a technical capacity, but an editing capacity as well. In addition to installing, customizing, and in some cases extending MediaWiki, I curated the content as well. I wrote more than half the articles myself, oversaw edits, enforced style guidelines, and more.

It was created to be useful to both those living in Mie as well as visitors, and some of the articles are now top-ranked in Google's search results.

A Website for My Own Wedding

Complete with a fully-functional online RSVP service, spam-proof guestbook, photo album, as well as a Google Map guide for Akron, Ohio