My team at Fastenal worked on a number of search APIs for the company. One prominent API was our product API, but our team had no official front-end to showcase its features and functionality. So I made an SPA using Vue JS, Vue Router, Spring Boot and Bulma CSS to show how quick and accurate our search engine could be.

I had some interesting learning lessons with this project. Handling state and navigation was initially a problem as I tried to do this manually using a big javascript object. I JSON stringified it and encoded it in the URL to handle page reloads and URL sharing. This quickly became a problem as the URLs were too large and I feared I was reinventing the wheel, making the app too confusing to maintain. This led to Vue Router and I redesigned the app to utilize routes.

I enjoyed working on this project, fiddling with UI elements and learning Vue. With more time and resources one future change would be storing shareable links in a database rather than passing parameters around during navigation. The URLs ended up being large and unsightly; keeping them simple with a shareable link option could contribute nicely to the overall app experience.

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I wanted to play with Spotify's APIs so I built a website using Node JS, Express, AWS, among others, which would return metrics for playlists and individual songs such as "danceability", tempo and popularity. I also wanted a tool I could use to enhance my playlist to be more dance-worthy, but it turned out simple metrics couldn't pull a good playlist from nothing.

There weren't too many challenges with this project, but the project itself was rather small. Spotify made it easy to authenticate users with OAuth2 and the documentation for their APIs was quite extensive. This was my first project deploying a site through AWS so I had to familiarize myself with the CI/CD pipeline, S3 buckets and deployment configurations. I didn't fully understand rate limiting through their free tier so I pulled the site down to prevent unwanted costs.

When I have time I'd like to go back and update the UI as it's incredibly basic. I also want to transition the site to be a true SPA and use Vue to do so. This project wasn't completed and I'm excited to revive it from the grave and have it hosted once again.

My team at Fastenal had an internal tool we used for certain aspects of product management, but the creators of the tool were no longer accessible and the tool had been built in a language my team wasn't familiar with (C#). I was tasked with migrating this tool to Java; the means of doing so were left up to me.

I decided to make a Spring Boot application. This allowed me to easily configure LDAP, role-based authentication. Migrating methods from C# to Java wasn't too lofty a task as I came to find the languages quite similar. With the exception of a few methods this migration happened rather quickly.

The front-end was written in AngularJS, which nobody on my team was familiar with. My team being a back-end heavy team we unfortunately didn't have any experience with any other front-end framework or tool other than jQuery. So I decided to stick with AngularJS and modify as needed. A transition to another framework would have likely been more costly than worth as AngularJS serviced the needs of the site.

During my junior year of college I joined the fledgling Computer Science club. In need of a project we reached out to the club in charge of hosting university events. They wanted both an iOS and Android app that would display their upcoming events and allow them to host giveaways during events. Another club member took up the iOS app so I built the Android app.

This was a challenging task as I had never built an Android app before. I spent the majority of my winter break learning app development, Gradle, and Facebook's graph API. We also used a hosted database solution which has since moved to a paid model, breaking our app as interest in the project was lost and nobody want to pay to keep it up and running.