Programming

This is part of the data for Charles Palen's Interactive Resume - Click to View it.

My primary skill set is rooted in a broad understanding of programming languages and associated markup and support technologies. My formal undergraduate degree was in Information Technology specializing in database administration. However much of my work experience covers a very broad technology spectrum. While still an undergraduate I utilized Java in order to make an autonomous GPS navigating robot. During my college internship I worked for Herman Miller Inc where I created a support tool in ASP.NET for their IT department that extracts data from an Oracle database to rapidly provide information about a users machine. In previous jobs I have worked on business intelligence projects for General Motors and Dow Chemical utilizing Perl and C#.NET. In my work with Boston Productions we use whatever technology our clients have the most experience with from C to Actionscript to PHP to .NET. I can pretty much make something professional in any language you give me; and I am not afraid to tackle something new under tight deadlines. I have a passion for robotics, so in my spare time I routinely play with technologies such as computer vision and streaming media for real-time control.

The Your Hershey Story interactive is an Adobe AIR program made with Actionscript 3 that allows users to take their picture and dynamically build a newspaper that they can email home.  The program incorporates a custom green screen feature that allows users to swap the background image behind them in real time. An actual newspaper made by visitors at The Hershey Story in Hershey, PA. A unique home page of the College Project showing projects that the user has joined.  The College Project was developed in a year and relies on PHP and MySQL. The Herman Miller support tool created during my college internship using ASP.NET showing the applications and hardware installed on a clients computer. The Battle kiosks at the National Museum of the Pacific War allow visitors to drill down into the fine details of each of the Pacific Campaigns most grueling battles. The Site Profile Tool created in Perl during my time working for Signal Perfection Limited at Dow Chemical.  This tool is a web spider that crawls hundreds of thousands of pages on Dow Chemicals' global websites and ranks them on areas they can improve HTML SEO formatting. The In Pursuit of a Dream official movie site is a flash site programmed in Actionscript 3, driven by XML and includes many fun sections.  The Trail Diary is my favorite. A page from the River Over Time interactive book from the Connecticut Science Center made using Actionscript 2 and the Page Flip Component. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History 100th Kiosk allows visitors to record videos that may be posted to YouTube and e-mail home postcards with their picture.