Last year I had the privilege of working on a project for Johns Hopkins University. It was a suite of web applications that provides hospitals with tools for performing predictive analysis in a variety of disaster scenarios. The project was grant funded and as such was very limited in the time and resources available. It was an exciting project with a real sense of purpose, and I was very proud of what we were able to achieve in a short amount of time.
My contact at the client emailed me recently to let me know that the response to the applications has been very positive, and also that we made the news. According to the article, the apps were supposed to be featured at the DHS’s University Centers of Excellence Innovation Showcase on Feb. 11 in Washington, D.C.
The project had a dedicated designer who generated the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources for the UI. The client contact developed a set of server-side DLLs in MatLab, which is where the deep statistical analysis work takes place. My role in the development was to integrate these two into an ASP.NET MVC solution, with healthy doses of JavaScript, jQuery, and Knockout.
It was a challenging and rewarding project that has the potential to make a difference in the world. Those kinds of projects are rare, and I’m very happy to have been associated with it. It’s also rewarding that the app is getting some attention, because it’s nice to get noticed sometimes.