Ontario Integrated Justice Project

Designed, developed and jointly architected an electronic legal forms and official record rendering system for the Ontario Integrated Justice Project (IJP). The system generated electronic forms in various formats, performed data extraction and reformatting, and rendered output to PDF for official court records.

In addition, Gary was lead user interface designer for the Ontario Integrated Justice Projects E-File application for electronic filing of court documents. He designed the complete workflow for electronic filers and designed the application screens for all user types.

Skills Demonstrated:

User interface design and user experience architecture

Perl, SQL, Jetform Central

Able to liaise effectively and comfortably with project heads, sales and marketing, acceptance teams, systems architects, team managers, developers, database administrators, and testers.

CANOE.ca

As a full-time member of CANOE.ca's four-person development team, Gary worked with graphic artists, sales staff, management, and fellow programmers to develop and maintain the back-end of the CANOE.ca Web site.

Skills Demonstrated:

Perl development on Unix servers running Apache Web Server; connection via Perl DBI module to Oracle databases

Ability to self-manage and work efficiently within a demanding, fast-paced environment

Canoe Weather

Designed, developed, and implemented a new CANOE Weather product. This replaced a slow, frames-based weather product with a streamlined, fast-loading, non-frames version

A major innovation in Gary's weather product design was the exceptionally-shallow navigation: only zero, one, or two steps were needed to arrive at useful weather data, due to meaningful weather data being displayed in each city's hyperlink

The overall effect was a speedy, easy to use interface that gave the user a detailed overview of weather across Canada and around the world. Many accolades from site visitors were received after launching the new weather product

Developed a monitor script that sent verbose reports to Gary's cell phone (via SMS) and personal email account whenever there was a significant gap in transmissions from our weather data vendor

Automated Elections Ontario coverage

Created a series of scripts which processed live CP Newswire data.

CANOE's provincial elections coverage Web pages were automatically updated in real-time by these scripts whenever election results came in

"Hockey Plus" subscription-based Web service

Designed, developed, and implemented "The Players" and "Depth Charts" sections of the CANOE "Hockey Plus" subscription-based premium Web service

Developed a series of scripts that gathered data from CANOE's Oracle database and from outside vendors, and generated detailed player pages and team Depth Charts, and updated player index pages

A custom search engine was written for the app, and included a feature which went straight to a players page (instead of the usual list of "hits") if there was only one match possible for the user's search query

Player pages were graphically rich, and included biography, many kinds of statistics, and a commentary section with a "skinny" on the player's performance and future

Scheduled daily automatic download and processing of data files from various information vendors to provide constant update to team and player pages.

Other CANOE projects...

Other projects included:

'Compass CANOE' Web search portal, which enabled users to launch multiple search engine results pages without re-keying their search query

Quiz application with natural language remediation

Continual maintenance of contests, polls, quizzes, and advertiser microsites

Current assignments

Gary is currently working on the front and back end for a Web-based applicationto be used by international Hotel operators to assess the effectiveness of their worldwide sales staff and to access information about competing properties.

All HTML resides in specialised HTML templates used by the application - not within the application code and not divided up into tiny snippets in a database. This allows full visualisation of screens before they have code to drive them, and allows easy, direct modification of the look and feel by any team member - even a graphic designer.

Skills Demonstrated:

Ability to modify business logic and data model in order to improve user experience and application efficiency

Perl; cookie-based session management; communication with SQL database

Real-time generation of chart graphics using GD::Graph

Related links

CANOE.ca Weather
Note: Page display has gone a bit wonky since Netgraphe took over CANOE.ca

Quiz application as used in "CANOE.ca Health"