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 California State University, Northridge. On any given day, I could be designing a front-end, maintaining open source projects, teaching profanity to a chat bot, or working on 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.

One of the first online games I discovered. I joined the community as a player and stayed as a developer.

Member of the development team for the game and the web infrastructure
Written several server plug-ins to introduce new game modes or help server administration
Hosted the largest North American community run game servers
Led the effort in launching a unified competitive league in the community

I hang around #jekyll on Freenode and help out users. Some of my efforts for the Jekyll community have been through open source themes and unorthodox projects to solve common problems in Jekyll without the use of plug-ins.

Created the standard way to generate Table of Contents on GitHub Pages used by Docker, UK Ministry of Justice, Apache, Google, JetBrains, and more

I spent time on #socrata-soda on Freenode helping provide support for PHP users and general API help. Since I no longer use Socrata in the workplace or school, my participation in the community has diminished.

Improved Excel support for SODA.NET
Wrote PhpSoda as an alternative to the official PHP library
Contributed to dev.socrata.com fixing UI issues

Places I've Worked

It's not all just open source and games for me; just like most people, I have bills to pay too. These are the awesome companies and organizations that have helped me do so over the years.

I am CSUN’s self-proclaimed interstellar sarcastic space pirate. I write mediocre code for the glory of CSUN’s future space adventures.

I worked as a part of the marketing team as a web developer maintaining the Associated Students website up to date with coming events and information about the services we provided. I did front-end development for the main website and built static websites for special events using Jekyll or stakx. I made sure that all of the organization's web pages were accessible and followed Section 508 requirements.

I built internal Symfony based tools and websites used for linking together different webhooks and APIs to our project management software; this allowed our team to use different services depending on our needs but were still able to use a single project management tool. Some of the components I built for these projects were made open source such as PhpPulse, a library for interacting with the monday.com API. These projects allowed us to have transparency with our clients as we gave them to ability to view the status of their project and communicate with the team more freely.

I was a part of Santa Monica's web development team where I worked on building and maintaining city websites; additionally, I contributed to several of their open source projects. Some of the bigger projects I worked on was building search functionality for the Historic Resources Inventory database, publishing our website analytics, redesigning the BigBlueBus website to be mobile responsive, moving all Team Foundation Server repositories to Git, and getting automated previews for pull requests against our static websites.

During the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016, I worked with the community broadband division and helped run the Youth Tech Program where I wrote the web development curriculum and served as the lead web development instructor. I covered topics such as, Git, GitHub Pages, and using Bootstrap to build mobile-responsive websites.

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.

Branding, UI/UX - Raymond Barrios
iOS Developer - Kyle Shaver
Motion Designer - Danilo De Leon