About
My name's Vladimir and on the Internet, I go by "allejo."
I pretend to know what I'm doing as a developer solely because I can't live out my dream of taking part in interstellar space travel. I enjoy late night food runs, eating wings, staring at my desktop legion, and occasionally playing on my PS4.
When I'm not building on BZFlag related projects or working on open source projects, I work as a web developer for the Associated Students at my college. On any given day, I could be designing a front-end, maintaining open source projects, or maintaining content in a CMS.
Communities
Since I'm not busy enough and am an advocate for open source projects, these are the projects/communities that I'm actively involved in and dedicate a lot of my spare time towards.
- BZFlag — One of the first online games I discovered and have been a part of the community since 2007. I am a part of the development team, host the largest game server, write server plug-ins, and help run the competitive league within the community.
- Jekyll — I hang around #jekyll on Freenode and help out users. I additionally have started to work on plug-ins and themes that I plan on releasing as open source in the near future.
- Socrata — I spend time on #socrata-soda on Freenode, help provide support for PHP users, and have written PhpSoda as an alternative to the official library.
Places I've Worked
I'm a part of Santa Monica's web development team where I work on building and maintaining city websites; additionally, I contribute to several of our open source projects. Some of the bigger projects I've worked on so far have been building search functionality for the Historic Resources Inventory database, publishing our website analytics, and redesigning the BigBlueBus website to be mobile responsive.
During the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016, I assisted in running the Santa Monica Youth Tech Program where I served as a web development instructor teaching high school students the basics of web design and development.
I maintain the Associated Students (AS) website, develop internal web applications used by staff, and build websites dedicated to projects or events hosted by AS. I also maintain PhpPulse, an API wrapper for DaPulse — the collaboration tool my team uses. The internal web applications I work on are built on top of Symfony and Vue.js, depending on the usage of the tool.
The Classroom Technology Committee (CTC) is an ad-hoc working group reporting to the Advisory Committee on Academic Technology, comprising stakeholders and individuals with an interest in ensuring the effective use of classroom technologies.
Accomplishments
I occasionally take part in code related competitions whenever I'm invited to do so. Here are some notable mentions of competitions I've participated in and the work I did during the said competitions.
I participated in Docker's Docs Hackathon to help improve their documentation website. I'm not familiar enough with Docker to be able to update/write documentation so I participated in a way I could still benefit the community: I submitted pull request #2860, which improved the responsive behavior of the website and reduced the redundancy of certain aspects of the site's Jekyll code. This single pull request fixed several known issues that existed and several issues that hadn't been reported yet.
I participated in CSUN's first annual AppJam event with a team of friends to create Coral Finance—a sandboxed financial stock application. The goal of this app was to expose students to the stock market risk-free by simulating purchases of real stocks to show profit or losses. I created a fake stock market, accessible through an API, which moved at a quicker pace than the real stock market to see quicker results.
How to Support Me
I do the majority of my open source work for fun because I enjoy it. If you've found any of my projects useful and want to support its development, here are a few ways you can.
- Star the project on GitHub.
- Subscribe to one of my feeds.
- Send a donation via PayPal or Square Cash.