Projects
NOTE: This page is insanely out of date. Planning to update it soon. In the meantime, most of my latest stuff is on Github or linked from recent blog posts.
I like to hack on cool software projects in my spare time. I also design high quality, standards-compliant websites for businesses and non-profit groups, but mostly for myself.
I started designing websites at age 13, when I first learned HTML. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about web development and the Internet — and I’m still learning.
Sites That I Built & Own
YouTube Instant
ytinstant.com
- Originally built in 3 hours using the YouTube API and JQuery.
- Featured in Washington Post, NY Times, Mashable, Engadget, Tech Crunch, Fast Company, All Things Digital, Venture Beat, Life Hacker, PC Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Hacker News, and Valleywag.
- Read more about YouTube Instant.
Study Notes
studynotes.org
- Built when I was in 11th grade.
- 860,000 unique visitors and 2,050,000 page views in 2010.
- Runs on Joomla, with some custom PHP+MySQL.
StudyNotes.org offers free study materials for AP classes, SAT and ACT exams to high school students in an innovative new way. This site is still in development, and I’ve got a lot of work to do on it, but it’s already been extraordinarily popular.
FreeTheFlash Entertainment
freetheflash.com
- Built when I was in 9th grade.
- 600,000 unique visitors and 3,000,000 page views in 2006.
- Built a custom PHP+MySQL back-end to make website content easy to manage.
This is the first real website that I built, way back in 2005. Not only is this my oldest site, but it’s also been my most popular. I built the site to collect all my favorite flash animations, videos, and games from around the Web in one place. Since I launched it, I’ve received nearly 500 submissions from movie and game creators.
Sites That I Built
Stanford Association for Computing Machinery
stanfordacm.com
- 350+ members in our chapter of the ACM.
- Site runs on WordPress, for quick, simple blog posts.
As the president of the Stanford chapter of the ACM, I built this site to make communication with our 350+ members more effective. The ACM, in case you’re unfamiliar, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession.
Hunger and Homelessness Auction 2011
charity.stanfordacm.com
- In 2010, we used this site to run the Stanford Charity Auction.
- in 2011, we used this site to run the Hunger and Homelessness Auction.
- Built from scratch using Ruby on Rails.
The site shows items donated by Stanford students, student groups, faculty, and local businesses. The items were all auctioned off in spring quarter 2011 with all the benefits going to the Stanford Opportunity Center.
Hands For Hope
hands4hopeyouth.org
- Youth-driven outreach organization based in my hometown.
- Site runs on Joomla, with some third-party plugins and components.
I helped Hands For Hope create a site that would be useful to their rapidly growing membership, and help youth have a positive impact in their community.
Oak Ridge High School Key Club
orhskeyclub.com (offline, mirrored on feross.org)
I was the webmaster and “techie” of my high school’s Key Club. This site is old, but I’m keeping it alive because of all the good memories I had in the club. Key Club, in case you’re unfamiliar, is an international student-led organization which organizes community service events to help the local community and help students build character and develop leadership.
Other Hacks
- Proxy Detection (Firefox 3+ information leak)
- Beautiful br Reflection (Beautiful CSS3 in Firefox 4+)
- AutoTune Experiment (I sang “Amazing” by Kanye West)
- Post to Tweetie from Google Reader (simple Javascript/PHP hack)
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