Introduction
In an effort to become the most well rounded developer I can, I have made sure to be active in the open source community. The variety of open source projects I've been involved with have met with varied success. However the experience and exposure I've gained has been invaluable.
Monoppix
Monoppix was a "boot from CD" version of Knoppix, a popular Linux distribution. Monoppix was different however. This special version included tools and frameworks for programming with the Mono framework.
The Mono framework is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .Net framework. The primary programming language for Mono is C#. Mono allows for Web, Webservice and desktop executable programming. Mono is truly cross-platform. There are install packages for Windows, Mac and Linux. Since it's cross platform, code written on one platform will run on all platforms.
While working with the Monoppix team, I created a series of tutorial documents and videos to help others learn how to use Monoppix as well as how to program with Mono. There were a wide variety of tutorial videos ranging from simple "Hello world" apps to a demonstration of an object serialization system being run on Linux as well as Windows while using a SQLServer database.
Monoppix wasn't the only Knoppix based Mono distribution however. In late-2005, the group abandoned development as another distribution became more popular. The experience I gained from working with a distributed open-source team and creating detailed training materials was quite valuable.
Easy Family Portal
Easy Family Portal is a Ruby on Rails web application intended to help families keep in touch on the internet. It includes several features including:
- AJAX based interface utilizing Prototype javascript library
- News and Announcements
- Private Data based on login
- Photoalbum utilizing Lightbox 2.0 javascript library
Learn more about Easy Family Portal at http://efp.rubyforge.org/
Easy Project
Easy Project is a glorified "to do list" intended for programmers who have to manage smaller aspects of projects. The idea of "project management for programmers" is what drove this system.
Much of the inspiration for EasyProject comes from 37Signals excellent book "Getting Real". It advocates simplicity over complexity. The basic philosophy they promote is that systems should be as simple as possible; they shouldn't have too many features which will cause users to become confused and will cause the overall quality of the system to suffer.
As such, EasyProject is a very simple project management tool. There is no time reporting built in to the system. It's really just a glorified to-do list. It can handle multiple projects and can track tasks by any number of criteria (complexity is probably the most used.) It also has the ability to track different phases of a given project.
To learn more about Easy Project, visit http://easyproj.rubyforge.org
Vista Dreams
While I'm not a graphic artist by any sense of the word, I have taken the opportunity to create a few Stardock Dreams which are used in conjunction with Windows Vista DeskScapes.
The dreams I created are high definition full-motion video. While I have created several dreams, the two I have chosen to publish are:
- Crystal Lake - A nice
scene from Crystal Lake, MI from July of 2006. It's a nice reminder that winter won't last forever.
- This one is *superb*. (Feb 2007)
- FANTASTIC Dream!!! My Favorite so far, excellent job with the looping its perfect!(Feb 2007)
- By far the best dream here on this website (Feb 2007)
- Sunny ForestDay_03 - A nice summer day in the forest.
- ... if only Mark could make the weather outside resemble this right now... (Feb 2007)
- Great addition to a very small selection. (Feb 2007)
