Consulting

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• SchoolSpring, South Burlington, VT
  
  
  I wrote scripts using Perl and WWW::Mechanize to log in to JavaScript-rich student records web applications such as WebAdvisor, Campus Pipeline/Banner and PeopleSoft. They are used to automatically populate transcript data for job-hunting students into a database.
  
  
• Project Management Consulting Group, Inc., Doylestown, PA
  
  
  I implemented new data entry and reporting features in an existing Perl/Mason/MySQL web application. The work involved learning the existing application control databases, creating Perl objects to represent the new data and then writing reports via MySQL/XSLTs. A script was also written to load data files off of a FTP server into a MySQL database.
  
  
• PPT Consulting, Newtown Square, PA
  
  
  I was called in on a time-critical database conversion from MySQL to MS SQL Server and a web hosting provider change. The remediation efforts also included modifying/testing the ASP webapp to connect to the new data source. The web application was up in half the allotted time, which included bug fixes beyond the original contract scope.
  
  
• University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
  
  
  School of Design
  Built a data export script (in Perl) that finds students currently enrolled in certain classes in the School (or who match override criteria) via the Data Warehouse and creates a CSV file for loading into an equipment borrowing system.
  
  Physics and Astronomy, School of Arts and Sciences
  I took faculty data from a variety of data sources (FileMaker, Excel) and synthesized it into 1 relational data set. I then built a Microsoft Access front end to the data for reporting and maintenance.
  
  Business Ethics and Legal Studies, Wharton School
  I built a web crawler to pull information off a popular social networking website and store the results in a MySQL database. The Javascript-based login system of the website was difficult to emulate in the Perl-based crawler, so I used snort to clone a logged-in session to my scripts. The data will be used for research in people and their social groups.
  
  Department of Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences
  A lab was looking to automate billing for use of resources, but had a few problems: the logs were in different formats on different platforms (Unix, Linux and Windows) and the billing application was a web application. I built a solution in Perl to collect, process and then upload the results to the web app. The fault-tolerant script is easily configured and adaptable for MACs (Moves, Adds, Changes) in the future.
  
  Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, School of Arts and Sciences
  I migrated a Microsoft Access/ASP web app to MySQL/PHP, which involved creating a new relational schema (all previous data was not relational), migrating the data from Latin1 to UTF8 and then building an easy to use interface. The app is available to the public.
  
  Department of Classical Studies, School of Arts and Sciences
  I upgraded a PHP/Perl/Oracle based web application to support a much newer version of PHP and to address a variety of security concerns. Considerable effort was also spent in making the application more portable to other machines.
  
  Department of Political Science, School of Arts and Sciences
  I created a proof-of-concept program that transitioned a Joomla-based CMS to a Drupal-based CMS. This involved writing a Perl script to read the data out of the Joomla database and put it into Drupal's, along with updating and creating new Drupal templates.
  
  Department of Economics, School of Arts and Sciences
  I helped the department with several bugs in their Perl-based web applications and transitioned the apps to use PennKey authentication. I made rather extensive use of Perl and the Linux shell to quickly fix up hundreds of HTML documents. I also helped train users in the use of Dreamweaver. This work has been an ongoing relationship for several years.