Purpose
The purpose of this website can be divided into three categories:
- Development Experience/Practice
- Self-Marketing
- I had already created the Scramble Helper as a desktop application, so why not expose it to the web
Development Experience/Practice
It has been brought to my attention, and I have also began to notice myself, that students generally lack a large amount of practical development experience and knowledge of emerging technologies. As professors generally don't have much real world experience, content presented in lectures tends to be way behind current technologies and most ideas are presented theoretically without even mentioning current technologies/practices that implement these ideas.
Due to this lack of experience, many students have to supplement their formal education with other available resources just to have any idea of what they will be stepping into upon graduation. Knowing this, I developed this website as a way to gain personal development experience and enhance my skill set.
By the way, some of the technologies used are:
If you have any questions as to the architecture of the site, or want to use my Scramble word generation Web Service please contact me. I have developed two separate web services for this project, although I only have the resources (lack SQLServer/don't want to pay for the resources) to host one. The first, which is used by this site, is interfaced through a HTTP GET request with the board state in the query string. The other service is capable of persisting data (possible use for mobile app) through a SQL database and is interfaced through an HTTP POST of the board state and the url of the generated resource is returned.
Self-Marketing
Although I've played around with many projects during my spare time, not many can be properly described on a Resume or during a time-constrained interview. So, by actually developing a site and having it exposed on the internet, I hope to demonstrate my abilities without having to discuss a broad range of disjunct projects.
I had already created the Scramble Helper as a desktop application, so why not expose it to the web
I originally developed the Scramble Helper as a desktop application. After beginning to seek internship/employment opportunities and being asked if I had any websites, I decided that this would be a good idea for demonstration purposes: not only does it show that I am capable of developing moderately complex algorithms, but that I have a working knowledge of web technologies.