coding
Software Engineer
Organization:
Community Software Lab VISTA Name:
Erich Jansen
Program Start:
1/2007
Project Description:
We don’t need credentials, we need people like Erich who know exactly what is wrong with this code:
my @servers = split ( /[,\s]/, $sline) if ( $sline)
- Help create a new volunteer technical orientation
- Setup server dedicated to outgoing mail
- Allow 80% of email administration tasks to be self-service
- Improve Web-server security and usability
- Configure SPF (sender permitted framework)
Software Engineer
Organization:
Community Software Lab VISTA Name:
Kamala Kalluri
Program Start:
2/2006
Project Description:
Ms Kallrui will be part of the group working to automate our processes so we can grow from serving 30 organizations to serving 100 or more organizations.
- Create or select customer relations management database
- Automate services provisioning
- Improve tech support processes
- Other related technical duties assigned
Project Outcome:
- Completed the downtime database
- Worked with several community groups to improve their websites
- Designed new business cards
- Participated in our presentation at the NTEN conference
- Updated our customer directory
- Developed application to measure server failures and failure causes
- Developed interface between teen center donor database and website to allow people to add themselves to the database
- Worked on installing and configuring photo gallery software on web server
- Installed and configured blog software, integrated it to website
Software Engineer
Organization:
Community Software Lab VISTA Name:
Charles McCallum
Program Start:
6/2005
Project Description:
Chuck will be creating databases and preparing training modules.
Impact Quote:
Chuck is potentially the most talented software developer I’ve worked with. On technical merit he is at least the equal of Google and Cisco employes that I’ve worked with. He has accomplished more in his 6 months with us than many of his predecessors have accomplished in 2 years.
Software Developer
Organization:
Community Software Lab VISTA Name:
Lee Goodrich
Program Start:
8/2009
Program End:
8/2010
Project Description:
The VISTA will work to develop NorthShorePort.org, an online database of resources to help those in poverty in the North Shore Port area.
GOALS:
add features
improve packaging
improve user friendliness
add infrastructure
An example of a new feature would be a report that lists the services that are not available in a given city.
We hope to have our software apt-get installable on Debian/Ubuntu Learning the Debian package system is a prerequisite for this goal
To achieve even better user friendliness, we do lots of usability testing. We watch people use our software, change things they are struggling with and re-test.
Infrastructure includes unit tests, integration tests, documentation, little utility scripts (like “clean”)
"DigitalBicycle" Program Development
Organization:
Lowell Telecommunications Corporation VISTA Name:
Ben Sheldon
Program Start:
8/2005
Program End:
8/2006
Project Description:
Ben will serve in a capacity building role related to the social network and technical infrastructure of the DigitalBicycle project. This will include some work in PHP/Drupal, working on user interface and workflow issues, assisting in the development of custom Linux installs for organizational “seeds”, and serving as a liaison with partner organizations. Writing will be a key part of Ben’s service, including documentation, training materials, and grant application materials. He may also serve as a representative of the DigitalBicycle at conferences and meetings, and may be asked to participate in presentations and panel discussions.
Project Outcome:
Ben successfully created a content moderation module for Drupal using PHP for comments, users, and submitted content. Ben also created an Amazon Lists type module, that allowed users to create lists of things like on Amazon, and get them in an RSS feed.
Ben also did a huge amount of outreach and networking for the “DigitalBicycle” project. He spoke on the New Media Distribution panel at the B&H Photo conference in NYC and at the Beyond Broadcast Conference.
Ben also created logos and graphics for “DigitalBicycle” using inkscape.
'DigitalBicycle' Online Communities Developer
Organization:
Lowell Telecommunications Corporation VISTA Name:
Peter Bull
Program Start:
9/2004
Program End:
9/2005
Project Description:
Peter Bull began his term of service at LTC in September 2004, and served for one year as LTC’s Online Communities Developer. In this role he led the development of the DigitalBicycle, a collaborative project sponsored by LTC and other partners including the CTC VISTA project.
Project Outcome:
Peter oversaw and directly implemented numerous aspects of the “DigitalBicycle” project, primarily focusing on developing a Drupal-based centralized web community that leverages the power of the distributed network but provides for efficient and usable group collaboration. This included planning the framework and workflow of the site, the setup and administration of the server, development and implementation of the code that powers the system, and preparation for the future expansion of the project as it moves from a beta project to having a working user base. In addition to developing the core web system, Peter worked with outside volunteers to develop the specification for a desktop publishing application called “Sprocket” and managed its development by outside programmers. Furthermore, Peter has spec’d out and begun development on a Linux-based client-side system, “KickStand”, which handles the automatic seeding and downloading of specified material and is designed to be used by participating organizations.
Impact Quote:
The fact of the matter is that the CTC VISTA program is directly responsible for where we are today with this project, ready to build capacity for organizations around the country. To get to this point we needed the full-time attention of a highly skilled programmer interested in working in a community-service setting. Not only would we have not been able to recruit someone at this level for this position without the CTC VISTA program, but in our current, pre-income generating phase we never would have been able to hire them. I have long felt that one of the primary strengths of the CTC VISTA program is how it empowers both the organization and the individual volunteer. The individual gains the opportunity to engage full-time on a project that is primed for growth but for which they might never be hired in a normal full-time capacity. The organization gains the opportunity to devote energies that might not otherwise be budgetable and if successful, build its own capacity to a point that it is able to hire an individual to continue the work started under the VISTA project. We are happy to report that this is exactly what happened at LTC.
Though we had high expectations when we were developing our work plan last year and recruiting a VISTA to accomplish it, Peter exceeded our expectations in every regard. While some of this was due to his accomplished background and well-developed skill set, it is mainly due to the fact that Peter worked extraordinarily hard and was as committed to this project as anyone could possibly be. Peter took the idea of 24-hour service quite seriously, working long hours at LTC and often late nights at home. Though frequently traveling on behalf of LTC he has established systems allowing him to continue development anywhere with a network connection. Beyond that, he’s been known to write code by hand on a legal pad when other options are not available. Peter has proven himself as an excellent VISTA and we anticipate that he will do the same as a VISTA supervisor this next year. We are extremely appreciative of Peter’s hard work and of the CTC VISTA project for providing us with the opportunity to grow our capacity so greatly in the past year. The CTC VISTA project is truly our most valuable partner in the DigitalBicycle collaboration and we will work to recognize it as such online and in person.
Software Engineer
Organization:
Community Software Lab VISTA Name:
Chris Sacca
Program Start:
9/2004
Program End:
9/2005
Project Outcome:
SINGLE NETWORK-WIDE USERNAME (LDAP SERVER)
This project moved us from a system that involved either multiple passwords for a user to remember for our different services, or synchronizing files between machines. Under the new system, users have one password, there is only a single box housing all the user information, and data about users is easily associable with their account, allowing us to do organization-wide address books and the like.
BETTER EMAIL AND SPAM FILTERING (EMAIL SERVER)
After the LDAP Server, our email service was transferred off of the one box we were running all our services off of and moved to a much more powerful dedicated box. The new system involved keeping all the information about email accounts in the LDAP Server, the beginnings of a unified login page for all our services, and better Spam and virus filtering where Spam is quarantined online rather than sent to the user. Currently, our Spam filtering is about 99.18% efficient, with a false positive rate of 0.31%
SYSTEM SCRIPTS
Chris designed a handful of different Perl scripts to automate and / or facilitate the administration of our systems. These included a reworking of out account creation script to handle the new LDAP Server, various small backup and synchronization scripts, and scripts to make sure that current configuration files and the files in our backup were in sync.
CREATED BACKUP SYSTEM FOR SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
Although we had checklists for setting our many systems up in the case that they failed and needed to be rebuilt, the instructions were complicated, and were not always compete. With this project, we attempted to put all the important configuration files into a backup system so that if a machine died, the configuration files could be replaced without rewriting them from scratch.
FINDING AN OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE TO MS EXCHANGE
Implementation has just stared. Exchange Server is a powerful group collaboration and organization tool, but it is not aimed at small non-profits. It is non-free software and has high costs. The goal of this project is to take one of the open source alternatives to Exchange and implement it for one of our clients. The system will allow our client to use the full powers of their MS Outlook email client.
BECOMING A DEBIAN LINUX DEVELOPER
Chris is getting certified as a Debian GNU/Linux developer. As a Debian developer, Chris can add software we wrote to the Debian software repository. The hundreds of thousands of people using Debian GNU/Linux can then easily install our software.
Software Engineer
Organization:
Community Software Lab VISTA Name:
Marie Shvartsapel
Program Start:
9/2004
Program End:
9/2005
Project Description:
Marie improved software we wrote to allow United Teen Equality to track interactions with their teens. Our 8 production servers need security patches installed regularly. Marie did weekly and emergency updates in December, January and February. Marie is also creating a database of service learning classes and is gathering requirements for a larger system.
Software Engineer
Organization:
Lowell Telecommunications Corporation VISTA Name:
April Carvalho
Program Start:
8/2002
Program End:
8/2004
Project Description:
1) Find, create, install, configure and maintain server based software.
2) Find, create and maintain server based documentation.
3) Test, code and document in support of open source projects.
4) Learn and teach software engineering and system administration.
5) Become familiar with the goals and needs of the organizations we serve.
6) Guide other workers (as needed)
Project Outcome:
I’ve run two more sessions of the “Intro to Web Forms” curriculum, which has been a success with the LCTC community. The only barrier to our success has been the lack of publicity in the course, which we are hoping to improve in future runnings. The advantage of having a set, web based curriculum is that another member can pick up this course and teach it without having to recreate the course from scratch.
After starting work on the UTEC project in the second quarter, our first web database application rolled out on April 16, 2003. This was a great opportunity to work with a Non profit that help us iron out our software development process and be enthusiastic with our end product. Since then we have made several major changes, including recreating the user interface to a more malleable design and adding functionality as the user requests.
Fellow Vista David Siegal and I have been working on this project as a team effort.
Recently I have been working on system administration tasks. One example is making our lab more available to volunteers, by ensuring that all workstations have the proper software. Once finished, our website designers can come in whenever they need to and use the latest software that we can provide them.
Software Engineer
Organization:
Lowell Telecommunications Corporation VISTA Name:
David Siegal
Program Start:
8/2003
Program End:
8/2004
Project Description:
1) Find, create, install, configure and maintain server based software.
2) Find, create and maintain server based documentation.
3) Test, code and document in support of open source projects.
4) Learn and teach software engineering and system administration.
5) Become familiar with the goals and needs of the organizations we serve.
6) Guide other workers (as needed)
Project Outcome:
David Siegal has worked to develop a template database to track client facility use for one of the Consortium partner agencies (UTEC) and modified and scripted form handlers that allow NPOs to collect online info.
David Siegal also switched the volunteer hour tracking database to a web-based client facility usage template.