Climate Tracker
Ascentium, an interactive web design agency, asked me to design a dynamic interface for their Climate Tracker project. The tool was an ambitious set of data capture, unit conversion, carbon emission estimation features. My task was to make one of the most complicated features (data capture) simple and logical even for a user who was not trained in climate science. Understanding the data and what it was used for was key to completing my goal and I certainly learned a lot about Co2. The results were satisfying: a feature which had been rejected 3 times was accepted and development moved forward.
Cool features:
- Fully globalized for multi-language support
- Predictive input and dynamic wizard-style interface
- Plugin architecture to allow 3rd-party extensions
- Science!
Cheatproof Texas Holdem Game
Working with a few very talented designers and developers in Seattle we were given the task of building a Flash-based Texas Holdem game for a competition. The concept was simple: players log in to play with fake money, the contest runs for a few weeks and the player with the highest number of chips wins a trip to Vegas. Holdem has been done in Flash a hundred times or more but this app had a key requirement: it must be cheatproof.
I designed a game logic engine in PHP which provided the Flash UI only enough data to let the user play. Shuffle logic and betting were handled server-side. User activity was compared against the server’s state management to verify that the cards in the hand were the cards the server chose.
Cool features:
- Secure game logic
- Flash UI with animations and sound effects
- CodeIgniter PHP library for admin and scaffolding
- Fuzzy betting logic which allowed the AI to play safe, moderate or risky bets
