I came in on a two-man project that was using Rails that could have been described as 80% done. I introduced RSpec, Selenium, RESTful design, and some Agile project management techniques to whip out a a set of features, a backlog, and a collaborative environment.

Tools & Technology: Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, rSpec, RESTful Auth, Fetcher, Selenium, Acts as state machine

At Dealerflow I worked on a Rails application targetted at auto-dealerships with a handful of people with varying skill sets and specialities.

While there I:

• Helped integrate ejabberd and Rails by creating Rake and Capistrano tasks to control and deploy ejabberd, devising a scheme of temporary passwords to allow JSJaC to securely survive page refreshes, and created the RESTful controllers that allow ejabberd to log presence and messages to Rails.
• Spent my final days reviewing over 100 pages of specifications provided by an SMS aggregator. I reduced them to nearly two dozen stories allowing me to estimate when we would be able to begin sailing through carrier testing. My hope was to allow SMS to be used as ejabberd's offline channel to allow people to IM even when they weren't at a computer.
• Helped administer a handful of systems running on one physical machine and at two prominient VPS hosts. During that time I migrated our development server from an aging Debian to Gentoo followed much later by a migration from a physical machine to a slice. During the latter migration I made use of mod_redirect to provide zero downtime for our SVN and Trac instances while the DNS changes propageted.
• Attended two Pragmatic Studios, one for Rails and another on Erlang.

Tools & Technology: Ruby on Rails, nginx, Monit, ejabberd, JSJaC, Capistrano, restful_authentication, will_paginate, Erlang, MySQL, Prototype, Lowpro, Scriptaculous, RSpec, javascript_test, Gentoo, Debian, SVN, Trac

I designed and implemented a project called SVNApp, short for Subversion Appliance. I created a Ruby on Rails application to make managing Subversion repositories much easier, and then packaged it up to run and install from a bootable CD.

• Created a Rails application that used Subversion's Ruby bindings to display changelogs; interacted with the user and group shell utilities to manage the systems users and groups; and reversed engineered ActiveResource's protocol so it could be used to interface with a Lucene based indexing service.
• Used Rake to control a Gentoo Linux build to produce an installable LiveCD that contained all the parts of the application, all setup, and ready to go including an unoptimized Rails based installer.
• Setup and maintained two servers and a workstation using SuSE Linux. The setup employed RAID mirroring, DNS, uninteruptable power supplies, and an ISDN connection.

Tools & Technology: Ruby on Rails, Apache, SuSE Linux, Subversion, Swig, C, Rake, Gentoo Linux, XPlanner, Collaboa, Bind

I was contracted by Andrew Shoaf to setup and theme a Drupal powered web site for a local landscaping company. I had to convert a Photoshop design into an HTML/CSS template usable with Drupal. Various Drupal modules were also setup to meet PL's specialty uses.

I maintained Progressive Indiana's web site, developed new sites for specific purposes, and sat on the board of directors providing assistance and input on the group's activities until a majority of the board decided to divert their energies elsewhere.

• My work on the primary web site included posting events and collecting news items which resulted in approximately 1,000 visitors per month at its height, around 90 registered users, and attracted the attention of Senator Evan Bayh.
• I developed a web site that was used to accept donations for a full page ad in the Indianapolis Star. The site featured a barometer to track the campaign's progress, and made use of an idea of viral marketing by making it easy for a donor to tell their friends about the campaign. The site can still be seen at https://secure.progressiveindiana.org/.

Tools & Technology: Ruby on Rails, Drupal, MySQL, HMTL, CSS, OpenSSL, and GnuPG

I offered to put together the technology to have an online chat which was used in a small post-election chat. This initially planned to be a Javascript and HTML interface to a Jabber chat room, but resulted in being completely database driven due to constraints and problems with jabberd 1 and my host.

• I put together a JavaScript and HTML interface to a Jabber chat room initially using the WebClientService component for jabberd, an open source Jabber server, to communicate with the chat room. Due to problems with WCS, I reprogrammed everything to use class.jabber.php, and then made it completely database driven because Jabberd wouldn't scale.
• David Sanders wanted the chat to be a Q & A, so I wrote a Python script that took requests from people in the room, and gives them permission to speak when it is their turn. The actual requests are hidden by the web interface.

Tools & Technology: PHP, MySQL, HTML, JavaScript, Jabberd 1.4.3, Python, Jabberpy, WebClientService, class.jabber.php

This is the microblogging platform that I use at bitter.nolan.eakins.net. It's the result of being prodded to join Twitter while working for Dealerflow. Its highlights are RSS support, SMS sending and receiving via TextMarks.com and a broken XMPP bot.

Tools & Technology: Rails, TextMarks, MySQL, XMPP4R, bzr, RubyForge

Psi, an open source Jabber client, only supported the undocumented group-chat protocol. I offered to add support for JEP-0045, Multi-User Chat. I ended up partially implementing the full MUC spec along with bookmark storage before the core Psi team decided to switch to Qt 4 before my changes were committed. While working, I generalized multiple use cases used to change an occupant's role into a simple to use role/affiliation editor that used drag and drop.

Tools & Technology: C++, Qt, qmake, CVS, GNU arch

When I reinstalled Linux on my computer, I lost the ability to access my list of passwords that was created with Password Safe. MyPasswordSafe is the result of that need. It's a program that provides similar functionality to Password Safe, but under Linux and any other operating system Trolltech's Qt supports.

Tools & Technology: C++, Qt, qmake, make, CVS, g++, gdb, doxygen, CppUnit, Portage

After I read Cleanroom Software Engineering and The Pragmatic Programmer, I wanted to try some of the approaches that were described out on a simple game. Pong was the game that I chose, while taking some liberties with the Cleanroom process. I made use of various design tools such as a specification, sequence enumeration, and a "tracer bullet". The result was my first working game of pong that included a menu system that I created, some basic AI, and time accurate collisions. And did I mention that I finished?

Tools & Technology: SDL, C++, make, g++, gdb, Adobe Photoshop, SmartDraw, CVS, cygwin

• http://nolan.eakins.net/: This is my blog which currently receives nearly 1,000 views of the front page and about 3,000 requests for the RSS feed per week. It contains samples of my writing, especially in the essays section which contains a number of Letters to the Editor of the Daily Journal that I've written. The whole site is powered by Drupal, an open-source content management system.
• http://www.semanticgap.com/: This was created early in 2004 and needs more content and a redesign. The highlight is that CSS is used to lay everything out on the page, and that it has managed to received on average 6,000 page requests per month.
• http://www.inside3d.com/k3d/: I created this in high school, and haven't maintained it. It's a good reflection of my graphic design abilities along with my early programming efforts and aspirations.