The Trade A Favor application was build for a start-up company in 2008. The application allows users to trade ‘favors’ on Facebook, be it services or physical products. Users simply follow four simple steps to use the applications:
- List it – list a favor on the application
- Find it – find a favor you want to trade for
- Match it – match your favor to one you want to receive
- Trade it – agree with the other user when to trade and accept it
The application used a feedback system so users could identify trustworthy traders. Statistics for each trade and each trade are also displayed to all users. A chat system was also integrated so traders could communicate when trading to easily agree favors, time and location.
The application was coded in PHP using a MySQL backend. The application can be found here.
The Nokia Tube Dance Facebook Application was a campaign to promote the Nokia 5800 Mobile Phone. The application allowed university students to upload videos of themselves dancing to a song provided my Nokia. The application accepted a variety of encoding formats (including mobile video formats) including flv, mp4, avi, mpeg, wmv, mov, mkv and m4v.
I coded the application in PHP and also wrote a shell script to convert the uploaded video on server side to flv format (flash video). The shell script ran on a cronjob to convert any newly uploaded videos and also generate thumbnails for use in the application. FFMPEG was used to convert the videos and generate thumbnails.
The application was developed in a LAMP environment. A MySQL database was used store video information, number of views, video ratings and comments.
The application was taken offline after the campaign.
The Video Aplication was built to promote Showtime’s new TV series: United States of Tara, which debuted in late January 2009. The application used a XML file to pull in the video information used in the application, including video file, video name, and description.
I coded the XML parser and entire application using PHP. Data was cached in a MySQL database and updated using a server-side cronjob. The application can be viewed on the United States of Tara Fanpage.
Skype Video Cards was a microsite and facebook application which allowed users to record personal video and send to friends and family. It was originally launched to send Christmas Video Cards in December 2008. It was later relaunched in February 2009 as a Valentine’s Day Video Card application.
The site was taken offline later in 2009 after the campaign was complete. During the Valentine’s campaign, over 54,000 cards were recorded, of which over 34,000 were sent.
For the Christmas campaign, over 24,500 videos were recorded, which were sent to over 35,500 recipients.
A single and multiplayer BMX game was created to promote the BMX Track at Platt Fields in Manchester. The BMX game was build in Flash and used server-side software to allow up to four players to race simultaneously. The application was build using a combination of PHP, Flash and JavaScript.
The PHP code and integration between the application and Flash was coded by a colleague and myself. Complex integration was required with Flash and the database, in order to save the best times, user information and maintaining user sessions. The leaderboard and other aspects of the application were created in PHP too.
My main involvement in this project was optimizing the PHP code and SQL queries. During load testing, the leaderboard struggled in loading a large number of scores. I successfully optimized the SQL query used to obtain the results and efficiently output the results.