FreePriceAlerts.com is a set of tools that help people save money while they shop.

It was originally built on technologies developed for myVBO but has grown to something much more. Some of its features are:

• An advanced pricing engine that quickly finds the best prices from all over the Internet.
• Toolbars for Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.
• A mobile website.
• Wishlists that users can create and share.

My own contributions to the project include:

• Collaborated on the user experience and architecture design from the project start.
• Developed a product processing infrastructure capable of handling tens of millions of products a day using Gearman as a job manager along with XSLT, AWK, Lex, and Yacc.
• Designed a RESTful API for use by all client applications.
• Partner integration.
• Designed a scalable cloud based multi-tier infrastructure.

I had the pleasure of attending the Boston Hack Day challenge in 2011. I came without any ideas of my own. Instead, I was looking to help a team that was working on something cool and genuinely good for society. I was not disappointed.

AccessiblePlaces.in is a crowd sourced website that helps people with disabilities discover places that are accessible to them and anonymously share their experiences with other people. It is optimized to be quick and easy to use on both a mobile phone and on a computer.

AccessiblePlaces.in was conceived and launched during a 48-hour hack-day in Boston sponsored by the Boston Globe and Boston.com. The team consisted of Anthony Deaver, Sam Bisbee, and myself. In total, 32 teams competed. At the end of the weekend the project was fully working and it was awarded “Best Geo-Location Hack.” It only came extremely close to being the audience choice award (only a couple votes off).

The site was built using jQuery Mobile for the interface. On the back-end, PHP and CouchDB were used. It was built from the ground up to have an easy to use RESTful API and stores data that is compatible with the Open Civic Data standard.

I was able to flex my creative muscles a bit. My personal contributions included designing the logo, writing the copy on the Boston Hack Day wiki… and of course a little PHP and Javascript.

The project later went on to be a finalist for a 2011 MITX Innovation Award in the “Doing Good” category. Although my direct involvement with the project was limited to the Hack Day, I am happy to have helped with such a worthy project.

CakeFest is an annual gathering of CakePHP developers. The 2010 conference was held in Chicago, IL on September 2nd and 5th.

I presented a talk on API Development.

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Expert PHP and MySQL was published in 2010 by Wiley as part of the Wrox P2P series (Programmer to Programmer). It is a perfect book for advanced PHP and MySQL programmers who want to take their code to the next level.

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MyVBO is a business application created by people who know business. It brings all your business needs into one place, including purchasing, stock quotes, Quickbooks, and social media.

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I worked for Lycos on the Webon from the initial planning all the way through several major released versions. The result, a clean and easy to use cloud-based web publishing product. The project is now the preferred page building tool for another Lycos property: Angelfire.

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