ACM Programming Contest

It was a lot of fun to compete in the ACM Pacific Northwest regional programming contest. We didn't qualify to go on to the finals but our school (University of Washington) swept the top three spots at our site (University of Oregon in Eugene) and my team snagged the second place spot at the site with 7/11 problems correctly solved.

It was an exciting finish too--we had only solved four problems with less than an hour to go in the five hour contest, and we got 3 correct submissions in the final 45 minutes to boost our standing to the top three.

I really enjoyed the contest, they challenged our problem solving and debugging skills and I especially enjoy working with the guys who were on my team. It was also a chance for people who didn't know me as well to discover the true extent of my nerd-dom as I missed an excellent party or two to travel to Eugene and write code instead. Carpe Diem.

Sweet they made an instructional video too!

I'm still really excited about the coverage Google Ad Planner is receiving.

Now that it's open to everyone, they made an instructional video specifically for my feature:



Ok so the visualization has an instructional video, does this mean it's difficult to use? Not necessarily, it's powerful since there are 4 axes of control and the video helps people realize the potential sitting right at their fingertips that they may not otherwise realize!

Once again you can check it out here.

Tech Crunch write up!

My summer internship product / feature was written up on Tech Crunch!

Google Ad Planner is now open to everyone:

Check out the sweet video demo then go check it out.

I worked on the bubble chart mentioned. There was a bit more to it then hooking up the Trendalyzer API. Scale and performance were big considerations as well as prototyping and researching different audience visualization concepts.

Here's a custom close-up of the feature at work:


I'll provide another link right here so you can jump right to it:
Google Ad Planner

What's Happening?

From the past--a project my HCI team worked on for a whole quarter, with a sweet video prototype as well as a very limited interactive demo.



What's Happening?

UWcourses.com

Uwcourses.com is a site made by my friend Sergey which came out of data we gathered for Statistics final project.

We scraped data from the UW Course Evaluation catalog (visible only to students) and even archived evals using the wayback machine and related it with public state employee salary data (not on the page itself).

The result of the statistics project was a wealth of relational data, and the site Sergey made hooks it up to an interface that is far easier to navigate than scrolling through alphabetical pages of the eval data.

Check it out, especially if you attend the UW

Bowie, MD

Over 96% of the campaign donations from my hometown of Bowie, MD donated to Obama.

Here's the amazing chart

Tomorrow will be the first time I vote in a presidential election, I'm doing it early because I'm sure the line will be around the block here.

The results are in

My group placed 3rd out of 21 teams in our school's ACM programming contest! We'll go on to represent the University of Washington at the regional tournament, along with the other two top teams from the UW.

The contest was to complete as many of 8 challenges as possible in 4 hours. Only three teams including ours completed 5 problems right, but we had the slowest time to do so. Some of the problems were actually kind of fun.

For example, this problem involved finding a specific kind of prime number variant named an "H-number semi-prime."

The regional tournament is on November 15 at the University of Oregon, can't wait!

(The rest of the problems/solutions are here.)

Hello world first post etc.

Ah it's the fresh new blog smell. Love the smell of that new blog.

Here's a stop motion animation video we made for no good reason. It was lots of fun to create and also to make music for, and escalated quickly after some faces were drawn on fruit. May be mildly traumatizing:


Untitled from . . on Vimeo.