A one-man shop devoted to creating and maintaining Web applications using open source software. Emphases:
- rapid delivery inside a consistent, lightweight work process, and
- unadorned, effective design.
Different Chairs: Web application development in Ann Arbor, MI.
Work: in my clients’ words
Dylan Barrell, Principal
TimeToMarket.us LLC
“Brian is a very thoughtful, conscientious and highly skilled Python/Django, Web and iPhone programmer. He knows when it is appropriate to just get things done and when it is appropriate to suggest design or implementation alternatives or improvements. He is a pleasure to work with and I found him to have the highest level of integrity in all of his actions.”
Mike Newman, lead developer
JustWeather.com
“Contracted employees generally just get in, get the code done and get out. With Brian, I could trust the code not only got the job done, but it was of a quality that I knew I could maintain for the future. The success of the JustWeather.com Web sites owes a lot of its credit to Brian’s hard work.”
Work: selected projects
A2Docs.org: tracking citizen requests for local government documents
View a larger image or visit the site.
- Volunteer project.
- Engagement: 2009 Q3.
University of Michigan student Matt Hampel wrote a simple Django Web application to help citizens capture public records and documents relating to local government in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I worked with Matt get the project started, squashed some bugs, and now provide ongoing support and hosting for what’s becoming a substantial collection.
The local paper covered the site’s launch.
JustWeather.com: regional weather sites
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- Client: Post-Newsweek Stations, broadcast division of the Washington Post Company.
- Engagement: 2008 Q2 and Q3.
An in-house developer and I collaborated to write the Web application and supporting software that powers a constellation of regional weather sites.
The JustWeather sites aggregate weather maps, data, observations, and predictions from a wide variety of sources into curated, strongly branded presentations of local weather.
While I was involved from the design of the sites’ internal APIs to the production of front-end markup, my work focused on integration with the variety of APIs and feeds used to transmit raw weather data. Key technologies for this project included Django and YUI.
Work: open source releases
See http://code.xca2.com for code under public development.
django-textmate-bundles
django-textmate-bundles is yet another bundle for the Mac OS editor Textmate providing support for Django development (models, forms, admin, shortcuts, etc.) and the Django templating system. The original goal of the project was to bring the existing, outdated bundles up to snuff for Django’s 1.0 release; that’s done, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.