Portfolio

Aside from my professional experience I've also had a few side projects. In no particular order, here's a few things I've worked on

Sonic Pi core team

I'm very lucky to be working on the Sonic Pi project which combines Ruby and SuperCollider to allow anybody to write programs to create good music. As well as working on the codebase I have written some short pieces and examples at gist.github.com/xavriley

• url: sonic-pi.net
• src: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi

PFI Explorer

As part of the Rewired State Accountability Hack 2014 I took part in the winning entry in the National Audit Office category. We built a tool to combine HMS Treasury data with several other sources to produce a browsable interface of the currently active PFI projects that the government is undertaking. The result was a proof of concept to illustrate ways in which the NAO might be able to publish results without resorting to the PDF reporting format.

• url: http://www.pfi-explorer.co.uk/
• src: https://github.com/jms301/pfi-explorer
• description: http://hacks.rewiredstate.org/events/acchack14/pfi-explorer

Wikidata Family Tree Explorer

A tool to explore family tree relationships using Wikidata. Built in the runup to Wikimania 2014.

• tools: Wikidata API, Ruby, Sinatra, Sigma.js, Typhoeus gem
• src: https://github.com/xavriley/wikidata-family-tree
• url: http://wikidata-family-tree.herokuapp.com/

Cosy companies

Similar to the above, but this time visualising the relationships between UK companies that have a postcode and one or more officers in common.

• tools: OpenCorporates API, as above
• src: see above
• url: https://cosy-companies.herokuapp.com/

UK MEPs candidate data

A proof of concept to illustrate the value of political data in the runup to the 2014 European Elections. Using scrapers written in Ruby I extracted all the UK MEP candidates into a JSON file and published this as data. Using this file I ran all the names through OpenCorporates to see which company directorships the candidates held.

• url/src: https://github.com/xavriley/uk-mep-candidates-2014

Overtone Documentation

I took an interest in the Clojure project Overtone (which has the same lead developer as Sonic Pi) but found it hard to get started. I attempted to fork and run a version of the popular ClojureDocs site to work with the Overtone codebase. This worked but required some changes which remained in my fork. I'm including it here as an example of my experiments with Clojure. The front end site was written in Rails but the importer was a Clojure program. This has since been superseded by other Clojure documentation projects.

• url: http://overtone-docs.herokuapp.com/
• src (Rails frontend): https://github.com/xavriley/overtone-docs
• src (Clojure backend): https://github.com/xavriley/overtone-docs-analyzer

Talks

I quite enjoy giving talks and I've been lucky enough to present at some great events. Here's a selection of the recorded ones.

Live Coding in the Classroom

Co-presented talk on Sonic Pi with the lead developer Sam Aaron. My bit starts at 27m10s

• event: London Ruby Users Group October 2014 meetup
• date: 13/10/2014
• video + description: https://www.skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/5809-live-coding-in-the-classroom

Coding Music: As easy as Pi

Had a speaker slot at the WXG web conference in Guildford. Presented an introduction to programming music with Sonic Pi in which I demo a few of my experiments. The video/audio didn't come out too well but the talk was well received I think.

• video: http://vimeo.com/album/3074731/video/108999162
• slides: http://sonic-pi-talk.herokuapp.com/#/
• date: 29/09/2014

Say Hello to Padrino

Whilst working at Kyan I used Padrino for several projects and gave this experience report. I was quite into the idea of code generators at the time but I've since come to realise they aren't always so great. I've left it up here for posterity.

• video: https://www.skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/4085-padrino
• date: 08/04/13
• slides: https://speakerdeck.com/xavriley/say-hello-to-padrino