Katherine Verbeck
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The Group Recipe Collection was a PHP/Heroku Facebook application developed in a college course with one other student. It began with a simple idea — being able to have a food blog on Facebook, where most people spend their time, so that people don't have to take the extra step of figuring out how to create a blog on Blogger, WordPress, etc. I designed and coded the majority of the key functions, but the images were created by and the database was hooked up and hosted by my partner. The original prototype was designed by me. I wrote a final description of the application, which you can see among the files above. Within that paper is a URL to the Facebook application on Facebook. As of 7/8/2012 it is functioning, but we are not advertising it for public use because of the cost it would take for my partner to host the database containing the recipe information.
Working in a group of two other people during a college Web Information Systems class at Cornell University, our assignment was to create a web application drawing from several different APIs. We decided to design an application that took the APIs of Google Maps, Etsy, and Yelp to help users decide where they might congregate to craft or sell their Etsy products. Etsy is an online marketplace for handmade goods that individuals around the world create for profit and for fun. Our application takes an Etsy user's location and figures out users nearby and visualizes their location in Google Maps along with ideas for "meeting up" with data from Yelp. Our final application was a use prototype, taking specific users from the Ithaca, NY area as well as nearby Yelp locations. Etsy Users using this app would be able to find, create, and edit events. See a paper description included with the files above. This application is not live.
Rage Bake, formerly A Cake for College, is my personal baking/cooking blog that I have run since April 2010. One of my passions is baking and creating food that other people enjoy, and this blog is an example of how I can stick to one thing as well as my experience with the blogging world. I am an avid user of Google Reader to read the blogs I follow, and make sure to update my own blog fairly frequently. The posts on this baking blog are also an example of my creativity — I love to try new recipes, decorate cakes in different ways, and sometimes slightly alter recipes that I find depending on what I think will be good (and occasionally make mistakes that turn out great!). Updating this blog, alongside baking and cooking for the blog, is one of my hobbies that I always come back to. My blog is located at http://ragebaker.blogspot.com. Please feel free to check it out (and follow it)!
One thing that college helped me excel at is learning to work (and love to work) in a group. The Table Stitch was a piece of hardware my group created for a Rapid Prototyping class at Cornell University. One of the group members and I thought of the idea: to create something you could combine with a sewing machine to stitch shapes — a cheaper embroidery machine. We built it out of MicroRAX and motors, programming in Arduino to make the stepper motors move the MicroRAX in specified directions. There are three layers of MicroRAX in our final design: a base layer, a vertical-moving layer, and a horizontal-moving layer. You can see the working final prototype on my group member's YouTube channel. Our original idea was to have pre-programmed shapes such as a circle, triangle, and square, but eventually got a Processing UI so that the user could create his or her own designs that the machine would stitch. You can see our paper on it included with the files above.
In my second college course in Web Design and Development, our final project in groups of four was to design a website for a client. We redesigned the website for the Cornell Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratories, which had had an old and outdated design. In this group of 4 I was in charge of most of the front-end web development — the design of individual pages, the creation of photo albums, and fixing up parts of the general layout, designed by another member. In this group project I took the main role in making sure people were on track and that the project was done on time with all the right specifications. There was a lot of PHP and MySQL involved. As of 7/8/2012 the website is currently live, found here.
In my first college course in Web Design and Development, our final project in groups of four was to design a website for a client. We redesigned the website for a nonprofit after-school organization called All Kids Can Learn. They have not yet updated their website as of 7/8/2012, but you can see their original website at http://www.allkidscanlearn.net. I had the task of completely reorganizing the website in a much more readable way, as well as creating the papers written with each checkpoint submission, the main PHP layout of the website, and the individual pages. I also had the lead role in the creation of the website and made sure the other three members were creating images, user-testing, and communicating with the client on time.
As the final project in a college course on Online Communities, I worked in a group of three with a research topic of our choice to design, create, proceed with, present on and write up. I came up with the basic idea of figuring out which memes spread and why, and with my two other group members, we came up with interview and online questionnaire questions to find out the most popular memes and try and decipher why they were popular. You can see our final paper included in the files above.
