Programming by Michael Forrest

Mood Tracker Facebook application

Mood Tracker is a Facebook application I built that facilitates tracking and analysing happiness and causes of happiness.

The key to this application's effectiveness is the chat bot 'Auntie'. In order to maintain an accurate record of one's mood, it's necessary to report your mood when you're not necessarily in the mood to report your mood on a website... Mood Tracker allows you to collect accurate data, and has certainly helped me realise a thing or two about myself. I added SMS support via Facebook's mobile API.

This application is built with Ruby on Rails using the 'facebooker' library. I'm managing all my code with git, deploying with capistrano, making templates with haml, monitoring my custom daemon processes with god, keeping my tests fresh with autotest and growl and hosting the site with passenger.

TRY MOOD TRACKER FOR YOURSELF!

Some commercial work

Sony Playstation Portal - Lead Flash Developer (LBi)

I lead the Flash development for uk.playstation.com. This involved

Creating a powerful Flash text-replacement implementation called 'mikr'
Flash carousel using progressive enhancement techniques
Implementing an animated flash background (and fallback versions for unsupported browsers)

Canon irc2380i Configurator - Lead Flash Developer (LBi)

This is a Flash product configurator. Canon were used to these things taking 13 weeks each or longer to develop, with lots of bugs and problems consistently taking them longer past their deadlines.

I came on board and, in less than 12 weeks, with the help of one junior developer, using test-driven-development and advanced object-oriented-programming principles, to create a configurator that works for this and any other printer, with minor alterations needed to two easy to read XML files and a few replacement image assets for future implementations.

Interactive photo booth - Lead Flash Developer (LBi)

Chesterfield

I lead the development of an Apple Photo Booth-style real-time video processing application written in ActionScript 2.

The finished application contained nearly 20,000 lines of code in nearly 300 tightly constructed classes, with polymorphism to-the-bone allowing complex visual components to be reused in a variety of contexts.

The framework I pioneered over this and previous LBi projects allowed us to create what I think must be one of the most insanely complex Flash applications ever developed.

SKILLS

I like coding in Ruby On Rails. That's the ethos I admire and strive toward. I've spent a few years doing ActionScript development and leading teams of developers towards making Flash apps that start to approach the internal beauty of Rails apps.

CONTACT ME WITH FREELANCE WORK