software-development.html

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<h2>View my software work</h2>
<br />By far my biggest accomplishment is software that I created for the library that I was able to open source.  In addition to seeing our listserv grow to over 500, and see many other universities use this software, the most gratifying part is that while Notre Dame's priorities changed and I'm working in a different area, other universities have stepped up to support and make improvements to the software.  Over the years there have been published articles written by libraries using the software and it has independently organized user groups at some of the major library conferences.
Of course, it was not done in a vaccuum, but I was lucky enough to have a coworker who understood how libraries work inside-and-out.  He had some great ideas, and I was able to turn them into a reality, through using (then unbeknownst to me) user centered design.  This project is also what made me fall in love with UX and compelled me to pursue my master's in Human-computer Interaction.  I believe that the coding and the software itself isn't anything extraordinary, and the user interface is why it's been so successful. (that, and possibly the flexible data model :-)
<br /><br />You can view the drupal marketing site I designed, my work, documentation and data models on <a href="http://erm.library.nd.edu">erm.library.nd.edu</a>.  The code is available on github at <a href="https://github.com/ndlibersa">github.com/ndlibersa</a>
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<h3>The App of Happiness</h3>
<p class="small">*  Which will shortly be renamed, it turns out searching this title doesn't appear in iTunes search!</p>
<p>This is my most recently developed application, built on the beautiful ionic framework using angular js and cordova to package it.  The backend is a heroku rails application sitting atop mysql and mostly just serving APIs (and the marketing site).
<br /><a href="http://the-apps-of.com">view the-apps-of.com marketing site</a></p>



<h3>Library Employee Directory</h3>
<p>This was developed using Rails and various gems, using coffeescript and scss.  Unfortunately, it requires a log in to see the user-administration which allows employees to self-administer - including a markdown editor for their "About" section.<br /><a href="http://library.nd.edu/directory">view the directory</a></p>
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  <div class="section"><img src="images/emp_dir.png" class="left" /></div>
  <div class="section"><img src="images/emp_dir2.png" class="right" /></div>
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<h3>Bibliographic Cataloging Statistics</h3>
<p class="small">*  This is an internal application, I'll have screenshots coming soon!</p>
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<h3>Mobile Library</h3>
<p>I also repackaged this as android and iOS apps using PhoneGap (the repository is available in github).  It, unfortunately, did not make it into the Apple Store.  They cited that it wasn't entertaining, which is true enough - since it's a library catalog.<br /><a href="http://m.library.nd.edu">view m.library.nd.edu</a></p>
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<h3>Library Centralized Reporting System</h3>
<p class="small">*  This is an internal application, I'll have screenshots coming soon!</p>
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<p><a href="https://github.com/robinschaaf">View my GitHub profile</a></p>


<b>Prior to the library I worked on:</b>
<ul>
<li>Perl / Postgresql - In my spare time I developed a user-content driven site, <a href="http://mailleartisans.org">mailleartisans.org</a>, which is still in use today. This was done in about 2002, well before myspace started or other user content driven sites. If only I'd picked something with broader appeal than chainmail! :-)</li>
<li>Coldfusion / Oracle, PL/SQL and some Java (while I worked for Discover Financial)</li>
<li>ETL Development, Data Mart/Data Warehousing with Ab Initio (also at Discover)</li>
</ul>