Dan Tillberg - Portfolio

Homesite Insurance

When: June 2010 - Present
What: Platform Owner / Web Developer

Enhanced Homesite's consumer-facing sales and servicing applications, using all sorts of nifty new and old web technologies on a .NET stack. Introduced concepts and technologies including responsive & mobile-first design, test automation with Selenium, TDD, continuous integration, Less CSS, client-side MVC w/Backbone.js and Mustache, and gumdrop buttons.

InQuest Technologies

When: October 2008 - May 2010
What: Software Engineer

Delivered enterprise-class web application using C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, jQuery/JS, and HTML/CSS. Assisted in modernizing software engineering practices during the buildout of a small team. Led the charge to bring the application to life and improve performance as an in-house expert on Javascript.

Netflix Prize

When: October 2007 - February 2008
What: Solo Contestant

Developed a comprehensive collaborative filtering system to predict user ratings of movies based on a provided rating history. Predicted ratings 8.3% better than Netflix's baseline system. Ranked fifth place overall by February 2008 in the million-dollar contest to reach 10%.

Amie Street

When: February - May 2008
What: Software Engineer, Recommendations Expert

Worked with Internet startup music vendor Amie Street (amiestreet.com) to develop a prototype content recommendation system for their large and diverse collection of music.

Rapid Recommendations

When: September 2008 - April 2009
What: Founder

Web start-up that was to serve quality content recommendations as a REST XML web service. Built a P2P-replicated key-key-value store using Python to manage ratings data efficiently.

Cicero

When: September 2011 - Present
What: Creator

Cicero is a new kind of webserver written in Node.JS that serves git repos instead of just folders and files; it is built to support cutting edge collaborative development and horizontal scaling from the ground up.

MBTA Transit Times

When: May - June 2010

Used service data provided publicly by the MBTA to produce a heat map showing typical travel times from a selected starting location to anywhere else in the Boston area.

CSS3 3D Text

When: April 2011

Proof-of-concept demonstration of using CSS3 2D transformation matrices to mimic 3D text display. Someday I will make my blog render in this format.

Time Lapse Video

When: March 2010

Generated time lapse videos from a webcam stream in linux, and created an online gallery w/ HTML5 video to host them. Also learned to have a backup strategy, after formatting a hard drive and losing the project's code.

HTML5 Audio Player

When: July 2009

Demonstration of HTML5 audio and canvas in an integrated music player. The spectrum analysis displayed was a side-product of the research done for the Audella project below.

WebGL DLA Explorer

When: Nov 2011

Demonstration of Diffusion-Limited Aggregates in 3 dimensions using WebGL. DLAs were the subject of previous work as an undergraduate in which I co-authored a paper on the computational complexity of building them on massively parallel computers.

FreeCell

When: August 2009

Built a web-based version of my earlier C# Better FreeCell application. 14 kB of Javascript provides a full-featured FreeCell game plus a depth-first-search solver that seamlessly works in the background to detect deadlock/loss conditions.

River Defense

When: October 2008

River Defense is a Flash-based strategy game fashioned after Desktop Tower Defense. It expands upon that theme by using a dynamic physics model and by automatically recording and playing back other players' games. Over 650,000 games have been played and more than seven years' worth of gameplay have been recorded as of September 2009.

PS3/CellBE Image Processing

When: May - July 2008

Created a Windows C# application and a server running on a Playstation 3 (running Linux) that interface to analyze video images in real-time. Other CellBE work includes some later work processing Netflix Prize data on a pair of PS3s (with an x86 master node) using a proprietary high-performance clustering and task distribution framework.

Audella

When: June - October 2007

Windows application that fingerprints music files for the purpose of correcting meta information and automatically organizing music on the client computer. Works with the a server to track submitted fingerprints and meta information and to determine which labels are correct and which are erroneous.

FreeCell

When: November 2006

Built an enhanced clone of the popular FreeCell title in C#. Aside from a number of subtle changes to the flow of the game (without changing the rules), the major addition was a system that continuously checks the game for deadlocking. This fixed a major flaw in the Microsoft version where players often reached a point where the game could not progress toward either a win or loss condition.

DLA Explorer

When: October 2006

Built a Windows application to visualize Diffusion-Limited Aggregates (DLAs) in both two and three dimensions. DLAs were the subject of previous work as an undergraduate in which I co-authored a paper on the computational complexity of building them on massively parallel computers.

Animated Hacker News

When: March 2012

First app built on top of Cicero. Polls HackerNews continuously and animates interpolated points/rank/comments. Drag the slider to see what used to be hot.