| Ruby | PHP | Perl | HTML5/CSS3 |
| Rails 3 | Javascript | Node.JS | TDD / BDD |
| ExtJS | JQuery | Twitter API | Facebook API |
| MySQL | Postgres | MongoDB | Redis |
| HAML | SASS |
Jonathan is proud to have been the architect and builder of a number of systems using mainly open source technology. Many are still being used in production environments, supporting millions of dollars of business international in scale. A sample of his more recent public works are featured below:
Discussionware is a business venture of mine with several clients in the Health Care and Pharmaceutical industries. It is mostly used to host round table discussions with doctors, but has a variety of other educational purposes. Designed for Apple's iPad and other tablets, this app was built with HTML5 / CSS3 and Javascript on top of Node.JS, Redis and Socket.IO which eliminates a lot of headaches surrounding the current state of the HTML5 Websockets implementation. Discussionware allows a presenter to change slides and have all of the attendees stay in sync. Discussionware allows attendees to ask questions, answer polling / survey questions given by the presenter who can see these events happen in real time and can even display survey results in pie charts or bar graphs, using Highcharts, an amazing Javascript framework for dynamic graphs and charts. This was a lot of fun to build and has a lot of potential.
Drumagog.com is the website of a popular high end plugin for recording studio software. I was hired to develop a platform to sell digital downloads of their software to tens of thousands of people. I used Ruby on Rails 3.0, Cucumber, RSpec, and Resque to handle the queuing system which is responsible for interacting with their digital copy protection vendor. I also used Redis as a caching mechanism for standard Rails page caching but also to cache expensive queries against their decade old legacy database which is responsible for determining upgrade eligibility. Since Drumagog is such a popular and long awaited piece of software for the Music Studio Recording industry, I had to handle large amounts of traffic which required several strategies for scaling Ruby on Rails. I used standard page caching, action caching, fragment caching, database tuning, Phusion Passenger optimization strategies, as well as Apache performance tuning for their many download mirrors.
SpendForGood utilizes several popular affiliate networks, and is a highly automated business model which requires minimal input from the site's creators. It is a powerful platform which has the potential to generate boat loads of cash for the NonProfit sector, which was a key reason I took the project. As a user, if you are willing to add just one additional click to your online shopping process, you can donate a decent amount of money to one of five thousand charities without doing anything but shopping online at your favorite retailers like you already do. SpendForGood is written on the Ruby on Rails platform and uses Mechanize / Nokogiri and several other cool libraries for automating the affiliate integration. Jquery was also used heavily throughout the site. I had the pleasure of working with StayInformed Studios who was responsible for the elegant graphic design.
Carprofiles.com is currently under active development and is in the alpha stage. It is being written in Ruby on Rails 3.0, will have Facebook integration and many other new features which I am excited to finally get the chance to implement.
AntiClothes.com is another successful Art community which sells T-Shirts, and is powered by Ruby on Rails and J-Query. One of my favorite graphic designers provided the graphics for this site. I developed the CSS, Javascript, and Ruby on Rails back-end. Since Anticlothes.com is a high traffic site, it relies heavily on Rails caching features and implements many best practices for scaling Ruby on Rails including Memcache, Mysql Replication, and many other performance tuning methods. I have since developed a healthy relationship with Anticlothes.com's founder, who owns Fastlife Media. Fastlife Media is currently launching Carprofiles.com and we have many other business ideas in the works.
Teeinvaders is a T-Shirt / Design Contest community website. Due to the success of Haha Press, a number of people have approached me wanting to develop a platform for them to sell their art. The founder of Haha Press and I came up with Shiny Stock, a platform for artists to sell their wares. Teeinvaders is powered by ShinyStock, a CMS and E-Commerce platform I developed in Ruby on Rails. TeeInvaders wanted a design contest component as well, so I wrote a module for that and integrated it into the app. ShinyStock, and TeeInvaders, was developed on Ruby on Rails using the ActiveMerchant and ActiveShipping libraries from Shopify.
I coded the Graphic Arts Studios website to the very specific requirements of the talented graphic designers at Torque, Inc. which is a design agency based in Chicago. In addition to XHTML and CSS The site uses a limited amount of custom javascript and PHP.
Buyadate is a charitable organization which organizes the buying and selling of dates with important people for charity. I developed the site using ExtJS on top of a catalyst MVC framework which I am in the process of replacing with Ruby on Rails. Designed as a psuedo-social networking website, it has all of the standard features you might expect, but the site also allows users to send video messages to each other, and to post videos on their profiles. The videos, once uploaded, are automatically processed using ffmpeg and then uploaded to Amazon's S3 storage solution in the cloud. I have been experimenting with the EC2 Elastic Computing service for this site, but have not implemented it because of cost concerns.
Haha Press is a chicago based community of graphic designers and printers which releases limited edition T-Shirts and Posters. In 2008, I was approached by their founders to help create an online presence. I developed an online storefront driven by a content management system, and gave them access to a subset of an order and inventory management system that I had developed. The site currently uses the Catalyst MVC framework and limited amounts of the ExtJS Javascript framework.
Prolonged Insult is an online community of poets and writers who produce quality literature, wine, and travel writing. I developed a content management system for this site using the Catalyst MVC framework and the ExtJS javascript framework.
Easy-Efile is an online income tax filing service which helps people prepare all of the important Federal Income Tax forms and schedules, and file them electronically with the IRS. I developed a custom PHP MVC Framework on top of a MySQL database for the tax application, and used a combination of perl and linux shell scripts to automatically submit and process the returns with the IRS. Most of the work was done in 2005, when the tools of our trade were much less mature. This would be a very fun site to redo using Ruby on Rails and ExtJS.
CPT Network Solutions is an IT Project Management company that I am proud to have consulted for since they started as a two-man shop in 2005. CPT has since grown to become a multi-million dollar company, whose source of strength is their business management software and the customer and vendor web portals. I developed all of these systems by bringing together a number of different open source technologies and APIs. The application is a very extensive implementation of the ExtJS javascript framework, on top of a Ruby on Rails app which serves XML and JSON data. The application makes use of several APIs including Google Maps, UPS and Fedex for shipping and tracking, and Twilio for web-based telephony.