Web Sites

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What you see today is a culmination of twelve years of work. I began my personal site way back in middle school, right in the middle of the web explosion, when Netscape Navigator waged war against Microsoft Internet Explorer, in the days of GeoCities, Tripod, and 2 MB ad-sponsored free hosting services. As the times changed and an ever-increasing collection of new web technologies became popular, I slowly adopted Javascript, then bits and pieces of CSS, and then stopped. I wanted to keep my site simple. But an increasing richness of user experience demands the use of more powerful and complex tools. In recent years, I learned PHP and MySQL, and decided that my site could greatly benefit from those two technologies. Nevertheless, I have continued to develop under my philosophy of pushing the envelope of existing resources while preserving coding elegance.

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I started this site from scratch back in the summer between my junior year and senior year in college (the current design was done in the summer of 2009). I had been part of the Stanford Table Tennis Club, and we needed to increase publicity. Building its calendar was my first attempt at learning PHP (I took it down after nobody used it for a year). Later, I added a PHP/MySQL backend to manage announcements, the roster, and tournament information.

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I took over the reins of the FiCS site at the start of my senior year. The website was falling into disrepair (as if websites could actually decay), full of redundancy, poorly written and poorly formatted code, and the information contained therein was in desperate need of updating.

The first thing I did was to refactor the code and update the content. As time permitted, I made incremental changes to the graphics and layout. I replaced the static HTML code with a more robust PHP infrastructure. To streamline the updates, I created a file-based (now data-based) content management system for the posting of events and announcements. The management system also allows the sending of announcements to the appropriate mailing lists.

This last update, I completely redesigned the front-end.

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The Stanford Alumni Mentoring program allows Stanford students to find Stanford alumni and develop mentoring relationships with them. The role of the website was to allow participants to manage their profiles and to help students find mentors that matched their criteria.

Without going into a whole lot of detail, let me just say that logistics was hell in the past. Manually tracking people who neglected their responsibilities, handling paper applications, and answering bug reports became a full-time job of its own.

The Stanford Alumni Mentoring team hired me to overhaul the original SAM website to:

1. automate as much of the administrative tasks as possible,
2. put the application process online,
3. improve the existing search algorithm,
4. improve the aesthetics of the site, and
5. build a more robust, bug-free system.

This site is by far my biggest project, and I learned a significant amount from my experience, in particular, about using classes and abstracting the user interface.

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In the summer of 2006, I with three other Stanford students went abroad to China as a part of a pilot exchange program between Stanford's and Tsinghua's Schools of Engineering. The group thought it'd be neat to have our own web log of the experiences. As the web “expert” in the group, I created my own blog engine as a way to practice PHP for the second time (my first time was building a calendar for Stanford Table Tennis Club). Not knowing MySQL at the time, I based the content management system completely on the filesystem.

Over the duration of the trip, I made bug-fixes and added a “wall” feature for comments. Months after the program, I checked back and noticed that the wall was deluged by SPAM. At the same time, I was running out of webspace, so I took down the site, removed the SPAM, and archived it.

After disabling wall-posts, I put the site up again at its original location.

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As a final project for EE45 - Science and Technology in WW II and What Happened Afterward, my group created this website about the German V2 Rocket. Actually, I did all the design, coding, and integration, but the other members did the majority of the research. This project was my first major foray into CSS, and by the end of it, I had learned quite a few tricks, not the least of which was how to make Javascript play with CSS.