Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
OK, I haven't actually seen these things, but due to the shifting nature of the web, most of the projects I have worked are no longer live and have been lost like tears in rain.
Despite my focus being front and back-end development, the following three projects are some of the most interesting and challenging that I've worked on. All of them required me to step outside my comfort area and learn quickly.
Qantas You Interactive Billboard
When Qantas relaunched their brand in 2012, Razorfish Australia and Publicis Mojo launched the Qantas You Campaign. As part of that, we wanted to support the online activity with an installation in a public space that showed people something they haven't seen before.
Partnering with Adshel, we produced a set of digital billboards that responded to users nearby running the Qantas You app on their phones.
Users registered with the campaign, standing nearby were inserted into the billboard display just by being in close proximity.
I was technical lead on this project and was responsible for managing the designers and developers, liasing with Adshel and assisting with the installation in Town Hall Station.
B and T produced a video showing the billboard in action.
Samsung Stadium: Sochi Winter Olympics
To celebrate the 2014 Winter Olympic Games at Sochi, we helped Samsung bring Roy and HG back to the Olympic coverage game. The Samsung Stadium app for iOS and Android was the only way to get daily shows from Roy and HG covering every day of the Games.
This was my first start-to-finish iOS app, built in just three weeks (with zero overtime). The app pulled in news stories, conducted polls and gave access to all of Roy and HGs video content throughout the Games. In addition to the development, I also worked closely with the designers to ensure that the app adhered to Apple design guidelines.
I was also responsible for building the video production pipeline where video files were uploaded directly by Channel Ten, processed by Amazon Elastic Transcoder into multiple adaptive bitrate video stream files and then deposited back into our Cloud hosting for delivery into the apps.
In order to facilitate remote management of the transcoding process, I produced a set of command line tools in Ruby that allowed us to remotely start the rendering process and monitor the rendering progress. These tools saved us hours of manual rendering, downloading and uploading.
Samsung Paragon In-store Display
When Samsung wanted to make their in-store presence stand out among the competition, they asked Razorfish to build an eye-catching, engaging and above-all, useful interactive display.
We designed and developed the Paragon display — an interative touch-screen experience that can work with up to eight full-HD displays from just one controller PC.
Built entirely with open-source software, Paragon accepted input from up to eight Samsung Galaxy tablets, allowing users to view demonstration videos, browse the Samsung range and request more information to be sent to their email address or device.
I was brought into the project, mid-way through development as a technical project manager. My responsibilities were the finalising of the hardware prototype configuration, liasing with the installation suppliers and project managing the final development, training and roll-out.