Experience

Foraker Labs

Ruby on Rails Apprentice·February ~ July 2011

Lured by my tech-brain and the effortless beauty of Ruby code, I left the front-end sphere to dive into the server-side world of Rails. The result was an intense ramp-up that had me churning out features within weeks and fighting live fires within months.

Among my many challenges were working with legacy codebases in a variety of Ruby and Rails versions; turning over features in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment; and learning to operate as part of a tightly integrated team.

Best perk? Hanging out with a team of experienced developers who generously offered their mentorship as well as their fun personalities.

SocialMedia.com

Ad Engineer·October 2010 ~ January 2011

I created interactive advertisements in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

My primary project was a transition library that allowed one image to be layered onto another in creative ways. Always the engineer, I utilized variable frame rate animation and mathematical interpolation to ensure smooth effects. Always the artist, I used my new library to pioneer a slideshow ad template that increased user engagement.

My greatest challenges were interfacing with a large HaXe code base and cross-browser testing my ads on all major platforms, including Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and IE 6, 7, and 8.

Senior Capstone

The Skew-Normal Approximation of the Binomial Distribution · Fall 2010 ~ Spring 2011

When the binomial is asymmetric, the skew-normal distribution provides a better approximation than the normal distribution, owing to its third parameter that captures skew.

In my paper, I introduce the skew-normal distribution and present formal proofs for its key properties. I then derive a skew-normal approximation of the binomial using the method of moments. Finally, I demonstrate its improved accuracy over the normal distribution.

Data sets were generated using my open source Python and R library, which is available in this project's github repository.

Read the paper, or visit the project repository.

Playground

YouTube Player

Plays selected video and displays its stats.

Truncate

My first jQuery plugin! Shrinks a div of text.

JoyceTipping