Nick Yannacone

About Me

Hi! My name's Nick.

I'm into programming, piano, puzzles, and cooking, but the programming's probably the most fun to talk about on a website.

I've programmed for:

• Ardian Group

  I've worked at Ardian for a summer internship and a bit over a year full time.

  I've worked on most aspects of their new data management and collaboration tool, PVITL, from the database structure and backend processing to the interactive web frontend. PVITL is specifically designed for collecting information about attendees of a big event you're hosting, which is why a lot of the features below involve gathering or combing through data about people.

  Some features I've worked on:

  • A drag-and-drop tool for creating registration forms. You define the data you're interested in collecting, and drag a corresponding input widget to its position on the form.
  • Importing information from Excel spreadsheets.
  • Searching through the data you've collected from registration forms or imported spreadsheets, and exporting the results to PDF or xlsx.
  • Real-time chat with other members of your team.

  Technologies I'm using: Rails, Angular, and MySQL.

• Microsoft

  I spent a summer working on the Windows team, specifically trying to identify when mobile users were hovering their fingers over spots on the screen -- like touch detection in 3D.

  While I couldn't find a way to distinguish between a low hover and a light touch, I could approximate the intensity of a touch, which I integrated into a painting application as the width of a stroke.

  Technologies used: C++.

• Roblox

  I worked for two summers at Roblox, makers of a game engine for kids -- as the programmers, artists, and game designers, not just the players.

  I wrote code for many in-game items, called Gear, that budding programmers could use as tools in their games, like a volleyball that you can bat around with friends, a sword that launches fireballs, and a gun that shoots cuddly walruses which compliment people.

  I also worked on several sample games which showcased the engine, like a team-based arena combat game and a silly tower defense game in space.

  Technologies used: Lua.

• VRevolution

  As my first foray into web programming, I worked on a prototype application to help people who'd recently been discharged from hospitals remember to make their followup appointments and take their medication.

  We scanned the discharge documentation the patient received upon reading the hospital and turned it into a customized list of text and phone-call-based reminders.

  Technologies used: PHP, MySQL, and Twilio, with a bit of Java for scanning the discharge documents. (We were using a Java OCR library.)