Story Photos is a website I designed and coded
to share short stories and photographs from my
travels. The website is fully responsive and
maintains a smooth user experience across a
wide range of browser, device, and OS
combinations.
I wanted Story Photos to have a unique look and
feel, so I wrote the html and
css from scratch. For the automated scrolling, I
used Álvaro Trigo's awesome
jQuery plugin
fullpage.js, and
for the black and white
illustrations, I made modifications to some cool
graphics downloaded from Openclipart.
I wrote the backend using Django, and am hosting
the app with Heroku. The app
communicates with a Gunicorn WSGI
HTTP web server, and uses a
Postgres database hosted on AWS to store textual
story entries. Django app
Whitenoise handles static file serving.
And I am using the Django app
Boto3 to communicate with an Amazon S3
bucket to store media assets like the
fullscreen background images.
This is a screenshot of a virtully
pixel-perfect frontend html/css implementation
I created for the Notify psd theme from Best PSD
Freebies. It has been
crafted to display properly on Chrome, Safari,
Firefox, and IE11+.
The
source code can be found on my Github
profile, and you can view the
webpage in your browser here. This
is a picture of the original
design for comparison, and the psd file can be
found on Graphic
Burger. Also
many thanks to Michael
Reimer for
the awesome free design.
This is a basic operating system that a few
friends and I originally built for a class back
in college at UIUC. Before starting the
project, we named it Segfault OS as a joke in
anticipation of the many segfaults that would
be encountered while developing and testing,
but the final creation actually turned out to
be quite stable.
Our task with this project was to build a kernel
from scratch that could support basic user-level
processes, as shown in the video above. Segfault
OS is written for an i386 processor, and
provides concurrent process execution, virtual
memory abstraction, a basic file system, and
drivers for the keyboard, display, and real-time
clock.
Even a basic operating system like this
collectively took us several hundreds of hours
to build, but it was an incredible learning
experience. The project enabled me to gain a
sense of clarity about how software systems
work. The work on Segfault OS was essential for
my later internship at VMware, and has generally
improved my ability to understand the bigger
picture of how pieces in a software environment
fit together.
