Projects
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Shiurim of Rav Aaron Lopiansky
I had the fantastic opportunity to help organize over 5,000 shiurim (Jewish classes), totaling over 150GB and over 3.5 months’ worth of audio, in a well-designed and easy-to-use website for Rav Aaron Lopiansky.
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Mural Timelapse
I decided I wanted to learn to paint, so I painted a mural in my basement! Check out this timelapse to see how I did it.
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Nonprofit Technology Overhaul: Central Jersey Diaper Bank
The Central Jersey Diaper Bank is an amazing organization that hands out literally hundreds of thousands of diapers, as well as wipes, formula, and many other items that parents need but cannot afford. Their technology stack needed a major overhaul, from their web presence to their warehouse and donation tracking systems. I helped them get their house in order, and just in time for COVID, which increased their rate of diaper distribution 61%!
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Jewish Wedding Pamphlet
It was important to me that all guests at my wedding be able to follow the ceremony. Jewish weddings have many stages, each with deep metaphors and symbolism. I created a pamphlet to give out to my guests, and received so many requests for the original file that I posted it here so that others can benefit from it.
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The Book of Ben Sira
I created this website as an honors project for my undergraduate degree in Jewish Studies. Built in PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript, the site digitally reunites the folios of the ancient manuscript. Prior to the creation of the site, the scholar or interested lay person would need to turn to a host of publications or websites – the physical folios are housed in Cambridge, Oxford, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem.
Creating the site involved organizing, standardizing, and editing the manuscript images sent to us, as well as the transcriptions and translations for each image. Each image also had to have its source and call number available to the reader. Finally, the site had to be optimized for search engines – it now is the second result for “Ben Sira” searches, behind only Wikipedia.
The project has been cited numerous times in both books and scholarly articles.
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Israel Active
Although I’ve made dozens of websites and web applications, this is one that I’m most proud of. I had contacted Michael Ordman, who runs “Good News From Israel“, with the intention of creating a database that to hold each of the positive stories about Israel that he’s collected over the years. It turns out that the database now holds over 8,000 such stories. Most blog sites are easy to mock up with tools like WordPress, but a site with that many posts came with a host of optimization issues. Making sure that the site remained performant and fast to respond required me to do some deep research into database query optimizations and caching.
