This app allows users to explore nearly two centuries of New York Times journalism.

As an obsessive reader of the New York Times for nearly a decade, I thought this would be an interesting and quick project to work on. I sought to organize 172 years of New York Times article metadata and unearth some interesting stuff.

For this project, I needed to efficiently insert tens of millions of rows into a PostgreSQL database. Because of the large amount of data involved, I did my processing on AWS and discarded unused pieces of data. After building the database, I performed database indexing and optimizations to ensure all my SQL queries ran quickly.

This application consists of a React frontend and a Node.js backend. It is no longer up and running, but I have backups.

I developed MapFroth to help people like myself plan their next adventures and enable the discovery of new and interesting destinations.

Due to time constraints at the time, this is my least completed personal project, but the experience was valuable for enabling me to competently use mapping APIs (Mapbox specifically). I also spent a great deal of time mastering the ins and outs of authentication and authorization schemes (using Auth0).

The hover overlay boundary data I used came from publicly available resources provided by Natural Earth and converted into usable data using the Aspose GeoJSON tool.

Omaha Cookie Co. was a premium, online cookie shop I created during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was in living in Omaha, Nebraska, at the time, hence the name. I had a decades-old, budget oven in my $600-per-month apartment and figured I could use it to my advantage.

For this project, I:

• Created a precise ingredient-management and materials costing system to account for per-cookie and per-product costs.

• Created a nutrition facts system to generate accurate labels using my gram-precise recipes.

• Designed beautiful labels and a handsome website.

• Sourced cost-effective and dimension-precise materials (e.g., boxes, labels, food sleeves).

• Learned a ton about food chemistry.

• Gained a ton of weight from "testing" hundreds of cookies.

This section encompasses seven full-fledged content projects that I embarked on over the years. While none of them took off in any meaningful way, the many thousands of hours I devoted gave me invaluable skills and insights.

Over a span of years, I started websites covering everything from finance to computer science to parenting and personal growth. I read dozens of books and thousands of articles on everything from marketing to productivity, business management, and others. I took on every role—writer, designer, marketer, developer— and outsourced nothing (except for the logo for two of the sites).

Some of the things I learned with all these projects include:

• Content writing and editing

• Graphic design

• Project management (for a team of one)

• Countless productivity tools (monday.com, Airtable, Trello, etc)

• Marketing tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Analytics, etc.)

• Legal topics (e.g., image licensing, copyrights, privacy, GDPR etc.)

• Web security (e.g., firewalls, Cloudflare, TLS, etc.)

• Web performance (e.g., CDNs, image optimization, caching, etc.)

• UX/UI (e.g., color theory, usability, responsive web design, etc.)

• Search engine optimization

• Web analytics (e.g., traffic monitoring, tagging, conversion tracking, etc.)

• Web Accessibility

Year 2053 is a satirical, dark-humor-laden, text-based choose-your-own-adventure-type game complete with sound effects and voice acting (myself doing all the voices). Gameplay starts in year 2018, but was meant to eventually arrive at mid-21st-century America (specifically 2053). Every choice the game player makes affects the story. This was my one and only foray into Android development.

There were many interesting challenges to this project that I needed to solve. I had to program the evolving nature of the story, especially with the algorithmic diverging and converging of storylines. I programmed the game to dynamically and seamlessly connect over a hundred audio files in different orders and patterns depending on choices made in the past. I made huge flowcharts to help me visualize all the pieces.

I recorded the audio in a freezing-cold car (through the Indiana wintertime), which was the closest thing I had to a studio.

As with all my projects, I did everything: coding, graphics, audio recording and editing, and voice work.

With this project, I gained experience with:

• Performance testing and analysis

• Android development tools

• Java programming and multithreading

• Audio recording and editing

• Creating basic graphics

• App publishing

Collabolist was my attempt at creating a quicker, simpler, and more convenient alternative to Excel for list creation.

I worked as help desk support at the time where I essentially set up computers for employees. We frequently used unwieldy Excel files for managing passwords, and these files usually took several minutes to sync and load. Like in my previous job (described in the next project), I was once again witness to the inefficiency of using Excel spreadsheets. Collabolist was my attempt at a solution.

I worked on Collabolist every waking hour I was not at work. Having recently worked on Geller Portal (the following project in this list), I still had programming fresh on my mind. As with previous projects, I used AJAX extensively when creating Collabolist to enable functionality without the need for refreshing the browser page.

About 5 years ago, I discovered an app called Airtable (airtable.com), which immediately became my favorite productivity tool. It is exactly what I envisioned for Collabolist back when I created it in 2012. If I had the education, foresight or confidence at the time to pursue this project further, or software engineering in general, I would have.

Notes:

• The images have the plural "Collabolists" since I changed the name at the last minute due to my preferred domain already being reserved at the time. But my heart was set on the singular Collabolist.

• The screenshots were taken at wildly different points of time early on in the development process. I do not have any screenshots from the final 70% of the work I did on this app. I cannot find more recent screenshots.

Geller Portal was an office management system I created for my employer at the time, Geller International, a tiny company with several employees. Originally hired at Geller to perform basic tasks such as driving and delivering things, I was passively witness to their many inefficient in-office processes and wanted to see if I could create something to help organize their data.

I worked on Geller Portal at home, in secret, after work every day for a couple of months before revealing the project to my boss. He was very pleased and quickly demanded its implementation and use in the small office. I stored much of the company's data in a MySQL database and retrieved it using the Geller Portal and a few database-connected Excel templates in order to pre-fill documents.

I built this system with the knowledge I gained from working on personal projects as a teenager, using many of the technologies I already knew.

I knew what I was capable of at the time, but I had no clue how to pursue coding as a career. I was a minimum-wage employee and was oblivious to the opportunities that could have been available for me.