SQL

In 2010 construction started on the new roof of BC place stadium in Vancouver and I decided to try at an ambitious project of capturing a timelapse animation of over a year and a half's worth of construction. Setting up a webcam at a friend's place across the street from the stadium, I created a simple program in Max/MSP to capture images at a varying intervals, and upload straight to my website.

I also added the ability to change the capture interval remotely, and set a different capture rate for daytime and night time. When the pictures were all taken (550,000 of them) I created a crude application in flash (which never left the prototype phase) that will load certain pictures and play them as a video with an adjustable date range or other features.

I also had ideas to filter out pictures with bad weather so I added code that reads a weather almanac website and adds that information over to the picture database, this information is also relayed over onto the timelapse player to give a sense of the weather at the time of each picture.

After 5+ years of having a flash-only based website, dolnik.ca was due for an upgrade. After having a good look around at what the current web practices are, I decided to re-create dolnik.ca and go with a mobile-first based responsive design using Twitter's open source Bootstrap framework as a foundation.

In the name of reusability and for the ease of future updates, I ensured that most of the pages are highly templated, and pull their content from a simple custom CMS using a combination of PHP and MySQL. As for the general design I looked towards a flat and simple, yet textured layout, with a parallax background with a layer in front that resembles a scratched-up frosted glass.

When the public perception and presence of Adobe Flash was dwindling, the Flash-based picture viewer of dolnik.ca needed an update. Utilizing various current web technologies, I was able to build off of the back-end of the current PHP/MySQL image database that I am using for the Flash version, to create a Non-Flash version of the picture viewer.

For the background image, I used php to pull the highest rated / most viewed image from the current collection and added a blur effect to give the current page a theme that represents the current image collection. At this point the more advanced features of the Flash version such as searching by location, tags, and dates are not incorporated yet, but will be in the near future.

In 2012 good friends of mine embarked on a motorcycle trip around the world, although I did not create their website (ridetheworldtogether.com) I helped with many small features such as a RSS feed reader which automatically populates any YouTube updates, as well as an interactive map showing their route so-far.

At first I used existing services such as EveryTrail and TripTracker which started to really slow down the map navigation as their route became much longer. I eventually took matters into my own hands and created a system using PHP and MYSQL to read GPX (xml based GPS files) and populate a database with time, coordinates and other info.

I also learned how to use Google Map's API to display a very complex route on a map using data compression as the line plots loaded onto the map exceeds 650,000 points so far. I also created a crude GUI so that all my friend needs to do, is upload the GPX files and press a button to load the points into the database.

This project is a multi-user drawing game where people choose a square to draw on to complete a collage picture as a whole. The concept was based around a multi-narrative version of the "exquisite corpse" (a parlor game where people would each write a part of a sentence and pass it on to a person who would add on not knowing the complete sentence). This project turned out to be very successful and one of my favorite works.

My role in this was developing the initial concept team lead of four people and head programmer. In 2008 new features using an SQL database allows for automation of creating new "corpses" (canvases), email notifications, daily user drawing limits, and interactive completed "corpse" viewings.

In 2017 Reddit created a somewhat similar project named r/place which also involved multiple people drawing on the same canvas. The main difference, besides the immense size of the canvas in r/place, is this Extravagant Corpse project would designate and lock off a drawing area for a specific person to create their art within, where-as r/place would have everyone in competition to draw over each others artwork.

As photography is a hobby of mine, back in 2007 I decided to create a custom photo organization tool to display photos I have taken using Adobe Flash, PHP, and SQL. It made uploading, organizing, and displaying pictures on dolnik.ca a very easy and automated process. All pictures uploaded have their meta-data automatically read, and organized into a SQL database to allow for easy picture searching and viewing, depending on factors such as date, location, rating, tags, etc. As of today, this system contains over 8500 images.