Fantasy Fishbowl

Fantasy Fishbowl is a fantasy sports app with a twist. Instead of predicting sports performance, players try and guess which songs the Vermont rock band Phish will play ahead of a given concert.

Before each performance, players attempt to guess which song the band will open with, which song will end the first set, etc. Players earn points for correctly predicting a song is played, and extra points if they correctly guess where it appears in the setlist. It's loosely based on a pen and paper game me and my friends play before their concerts.

Fantasy Fishbowl has always been my major personal project, and it's constantly evolved as my skills as a software developer have improved. The current iteration is by far the most complete, and I hope to have all major features working in 2020.

Current Features:

• Mobile-first web interface for viewing upcoming concerts, making predictions, and comparing your score to your friends.
• Automatic scoring using setlists published after a concert via the Phish.net fan API.
• An API-only backend built with Rails 5.
• A React.js front-end written in TypeScript.
• JSON Web Token User Authentication.

Check out the frontend source code on GitHub here. The backend source code is here.

MBTA Live Departure Board

A real-time representation of the train departure board at Boston's South Station terminal. This project is built in React.js and utilizes the powerful Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority developer API and its streaming service to consistently update train departure predictions.

Current Features:

• Predicted departure times, train destinations, train numbers and the status of each trip ("on time", "delayed" etc.).
• Live updates whenever the MBTA server sends out a "reset" event.
• A live clock.

You can check it out for yourself here; the source code is on GitHub here.

"Who's In It?" The Movie cast guessing game (2017)

"Who's In It?"" is a movie cast matching game I built while teaching myself React.js in 2017. Players search for a movie by title, select from the search results, and are presented with five cast member headshots. They must match each image to a scrambled list of names to win the game. Movie data is retrieved from The Movie Database API.

React has fast become one of my favorite frameworks to work with, and building an interactive game that loads data from an API was a perfect challenge for learning the basics of the framework. You can play the game here.

F1 racing stats API: Ruby Gem wrapper (2017)

Formula One racing has never been very popular in the United States, but it's been one of my favorite sports since I was a kid. So when I discovered the Ergast F1 stats API, I knew I had to use it in a project.

Working with APIs was one of the first aspects of software development I really enjoyed, and nobody had written a Ruby wrapper for the Ergast API at the time, so I decided to build my own as a Ruby Gem package. As of Spring 2020, it's been downloaded over 650 times.

The source code is hosted on GitHub here.

About Me

I've been coding since before the day I was born. I mastered COBOL and Visual Basic before I could walk, had a full command of Java by the third grade, and convinced some guy named Matz to call his new programming language "Ruby" before I could legally drive.

Just kidding.

The truth is, software engineering is my second career. Until 2014, I was an aspiring journalist in my home state of Vermont, writing award-winning work for a critically-acclaimed small town newspaper. After moving to Boston and getting hooked on code through Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" I decided the innovative, technically challenging world of software was exactly where I wanted to be.

That fall, I went to a Ruby on Rails bootcamp, and I've been understanding programming memes ever since.

In my roughly five years in the industry I've worked on all sorts of interesting projects for a handful of Boston start-ups, from API integrations to re-architecting legacy code to building custom features for product and support teams. I've always enjoyed the "people" side of software as much as the engineering - solving challenges together as a team, meeting with stakeholders, and iterating on ideas.

You'll find a collection of my current and past personal projects here. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, they are very nerdy.

- Nathan Burgess

I can be reached via email at burgess.nathan28@gmail.com

Resume

Senior Software Engineer

ProfitWell, Boston, MA, October 2018 – April 2020

• Cut need for thousands of dollars in monthly database charges and delivered lightning fast in-app search to customers by rearchitecting all search functionality with the Elasticsearch library. Allows ProfitWell’s customers, subscription-based service companies, near-instant text search and filtering of their subscription customer data from Stripe, Braintree and other payment APIs. Opens up feature to larger clients who had too much data to use old, SQL-based system. (Python, Django).
• Improved ability to pass security audits with large clients by adding two-factor authentication to app login. In use by over 400 accounts, feature allows users to scan a QR code into their phone and generate one-time login passcodes. Python/Django (API, caching, encryption, and test suite); React.js/TypeScript (front end UX).
• Preserved thousands of dollars in monthly revenue from European customers by updating “Retain” payment recovery integration with Zuora to meet new EU security mandate. Zuora API amongst the hardest in ProfitWell’s system to work with. (Python)
• Worked closely with remote engineering team in Rosario, Argentina on a daily basis.

Software Engineer

3Play Media, Boston, MA May 2015 – August 2018

• Enabled sales team to onboard new clients in the entertainment, government and academic sectors by building captioning integrations with eight online video platforms. 600+ customers linked via Facebook, Vimeo, Wistia, Brightcove and more. (Ruby)
• Reduced development and operations team testing time by introducing automated testing with RSpec, FactoryBot, and VCR.
• Presented coding basics course to sales, marketing, and support teams, improving communication with the development team.

Engineering Apprentice

Launch Academy, Boston, MA Fall/Winter 2014

• Ten-week software boot camp. Personal project: "Beerica", a mapping of breweries around the United States with responsive design for desktop and mobile. (Ruby on Rails, Google Maps JavaScript API, Highcharts, and Zurb Foundation).

Publication Manager

Hibu Inc. (Remote/Massachusetts)

October 2013 – May 2014

• Oversaw production, content editing and layout for magazines in Marshfield, Pembroke, Hingham and Hanover, Massachusetts.

News Reporter

Stowe Reporter, Stowe, VT

June 2009 – October 2013

• 2010 Rookie of the Year for both the New England Newspaper and Press Association and the Vermont Press Association.
• Awarded 2013 New England First Amendment Coalition Fellowship for work in investigative, government and business reporting.