A wifi hack for a p2p school at burning man

Koulu On Fire brought the Koulu School concept to Burning Man, Black Rock City - center stage. Koulu School sets learning free to make education accessible to everyone.

KOULU YEARBOOK (2016)

We identified a need to extend the Koulu experience beyond Burning Man and capture content from interactions with burners.

The Koulu Yearbook app allows burners to take selfies using the webcam on their smartphone to register as teachers, find lessons they might enjoy and provide a way to keep in contact with their students after the burn.

MY ROLE

Service Designer
Software Developer

I conducted workshops to design the service workflow as a team and I collaborated with the infinitely clever Peter Tapio on the hardware & server aspects. I also designed & built the app itself, packaging it to be shipped to Black Rock City.

OUTCOME

There were challenges. Many burners carry their smartphones as a camera, but there's no internet access - so native apps or internet-based web apps were out of the question. The project also had minimal budget constraints and the harsh desert conditions to consider.

To meet these challenges, we hacked a ZSun WiFi card reader to create a custom, intelligent WiFi hot spot - a captive portal like those found at an airport, which loaded our app instead of logging in.

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TECHNOLOGY

Angular 2
Webpack
Custom WebRTC photo booth
PHP on Lighttpd
ArrestDB and SQLite
OpenWRT on hacked ZSun Wifi router

You can find my lab notes on hacking the ZSun on my blog.

An operational platform for a freight provider

Neway Transport are a digitized freight carrier in Australia, specializing in sensitive and high value freight. They have branches in 6 states and operate nation-wide.

“Seb’s complete understanding of our intricate business requirements together with our positive business relationship has attributed to these successful outcomes for our business.”

— Gordon Boulton, General Manager

WEBFREIGHT (SINCE 2010)

The Webfreight system is Neway's internal, premiere software platform that manages their day-to-day operations, through which they also co-ordinate activity with their clients.

The Webfreight platform handles client records, reporting and quotations, consignment orders and storage, incidents, truck allocation, as well as specialized services, such as progress updates & visual proof-of-delivery for key clients via handheld devices.

MY ROLE

Product Owner
Software Developer
Service Designer

I collect & resolve issues, design & develop new features and take care of overall server health. I've done disaster recovery and major server upgrades. I've also provided technical advice to leadership and represented Neway while collaborating with some of their key clients

OUTCOME

I've handled over 400 tickets, modernized several system components and built an AS2 messaging link with their main client. I introduced test coverage for mission-critical system components, built an automated test & deployment pipeline and trained additional support staff for redundancy to achieve a 99.97% up-time.

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TECHNOLOGY

Windows Server 2012
SQL Server 2012
ASP.Net WebForms and C#
SOAP/XML Web Services
AS2 Messaging
AppVeyor

PARTNER SERVICES (2016)

Neway Partner Services was a strategic pilot project to upgrade & expand the specialized services of Webfreight.

The project prototyped a platform that allowed Neway to better tailor its specialized freight services for individual clients, whilst providing a client API, live data feeds, metrics and reporting.

MY ROLE

Product Owner
Software Developer
Service Designer

On the back of my previous working knowledge of Neway's operational model, I led design & development of the prototype system, collaborating with specialist developer Dale Holborow to iterate three varying implementations.

OUTCOME

The project presented significant challenges due to the need for each client's services to be completely customized. The final prototype was connected to live data sources and successfully showed that it could consume client-tailored services.

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TECHNOLOGY

ServiceStack and C#
SQLite & SQL Server
Quartz
OrmLite
AngularJS 1.5 (component model)
Material Design
Reactive Extensions (both server & client)
Gulp

An e-commerce platform for pharmaceuticals

Planet Drugs Direct

Planet Drugs Direct (PDD) is a successful online pharmaceutical e-commerce site consisting of a global network of chemists, doctor and shipping providers.

The PDD platform manages customer orders & prescriptions, billing, customer service & reporting as well as management of the content & product catalog.

MY ROLE

Software Developer

I was engaged by Evolutia to assist in backlog management, by fixing outstanding issues and developing priority new features. I was also responsible for designing & implementing a testing layer for the platform's back-end infrastructure.

OUTCOME

The pharmaceutical industry is especially competitive and challenging, yet we maintained the health of the server and released changes at a high pace. I built a new high-performance large image storage service and also wrote 1000+ unit tests to bring code coverage from zero to 100%.

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TECHNOLOGY

ASP.Net
SQL Server 2008
WCF
JQuery
NUnit & NMoq

Note: Planet Drugs Direct has since been acquired and has undergone several changes.