Projects

Ohana API

During our Code for America Fellowship, Sophia Parafina, Anselm Bradford, and I collaborated with the Human Services Agency in San Mateo County, CA to increase access to human services for residents in need. We built an open source platform called Ohana API that allows government, nonprofits, and community members to collaborate in maintaining a database of human services organizations, and allows developers to build impactful applications using this open data.

Our work was featured in several media outlets and was one of the winners of the Knight News Challenge for Health. We received a grant from the Knight Foundation to continue developing Ohana API in 2014.

I wrote all of the code and documentation for the API, the back-end code for the Web Search interface, some of the code for the Ruby API wrapper, and all of the code for the SMS app.

A live instance of the Web Search that we built for San Mateo County is up and running at https://www.smc-connect.org.

As the team spokesperson, I presented our project along with the Director of the San Mateo County Human Services Agency at the Code for America Summit in October 2013, and at the Healthy Communities Data Summit in May 2013 (see the Talks page).

Tools used: Sublime Text, iTerm, oh-my-zsh, Homebrew, RVM, Git, Gitbox, GitHub, Slack, Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Memcachier, Rails, Ruby, Heroku, New Relic, Unicorn, Puma.

Press:

Coding Skills Combine With Civics to Improve Government – PBS NewsHour

Civic-minded hackers code well for the future – Los Angeles Times

Code for America fellows working to increase San Mateo County residents’ access to services – SF Examiner

Providing Access To Services That Help Americans With Their Food Security Using APIs - API Evangelist

Code for America Team Arrives in San Mateo County to Strengthen the Food Safety Net – San Mateo County Human Services Agency Press Release

They Make Music

Interviews with musicians, focusing on the tools they use to shape their sound.

Technical Details: Previously a WordPress site, now converted to a static Middleman site hosted on Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.

Monfresh

My first and longest-running site featuring free House Music MP3s and DJ Mixes. You can listen to 62 of my DJ mixes, recorded between 1998 and 2009 both in the studio and during live DJ gigs in the US, France and Morocco. Also available are all 209 episodes of my Monfresh Sessions radio show, which I used to host between 2006 and 2011.

Technical Details: Previously a WordPress site, now converted to a static Middleman site hosted on Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.

Monfresh Recastow

My online record store specializing in Soulful Dance Music vinyl and CDs. Serving fresh slabs of wax for the discerning ear since 2003. The site is no longer maintained, so it points to my inventory on Discogs instead.

Technical Details: I built the site myself in 2003 with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s still up and running with pretty much the same code. It’s hosted on Heroku now.