Work
Since April 2007 I have worked at Current TV, "the world's leading peer-to-peer news and information network". Founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt in 2005, the company was just starting to prototype current.com, its foray into the social news arena, when I came on board. I've held a number of roles on the site's backend team, from Web Software Engineer to Manager of Backend Systems. While at Current, I've helped bootstrap the rebuild of the Current website, shaped the current.com search experience, and have overseen the rearchitecting of the backend as a collection of RESTful web services.
Before my move West, I worked on the design, implementation, marketing, and support of the Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft ® Office, an Office add-in facilitating the creation of standards-compliant and accessible XHTML via a simple wizard-style interface. The goal of the project is to leverage the information already present in the document via the Office Object Model (for example, the title and backing data table of an Excel pie chart) to create text equivalents and then to only interrogate the user for those parts of the document for which no other information is available. Simultaneously, I supported a number of internal tools at DRES including an administrative database, a workflow database for our text conversion office, and a variety of other odds and ends that took me from C# to Java to PHP to Python and back to C and C++.
Prior to my work on the Wizard, I was an undergraduate and then graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Computer Science within the College of Engineering. In addition to my studies as a graduate student, I worked as a Teaching Assistant within the Department helping teach classes ranging in scope from few graduate students to hundreds of undergraduate freshmen. I simultaneously started my affiliation with the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services and the Illinois Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility working on a database-driven, XML-backed student case management system as well as some issues related to X Window System keyboard functionality via the AccessX project.
