Alan Gerber's portfolio


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I'm a full-stack engineer—I've worked on computers at every level from hardware design to JavaScript frontends, and have an in-depth understanding of computing that allows me to pick up new technologies at a rapid clip. Some of the things I've build live deep within the guts of websites or aren't public, but here are a few you can see out in the wild.

I also have a few small projects available on Github, mostly on Android at present.

ZocDoc Pediatric Search

This ZocDoc feature enables users to search ZocDoc by whether patients accept pediatric patients. This was built using C# on the backend and jQuery on the frontend. Try it out!

Etsy AutoBill

What's Etsy's #1 way to make money? The fees it charges sellers for the marketplace. A lot of people forget to pay their bill, which isn't so good for revenue. This feature prevents that. Here's Etsy's explanation of this feature. If you're an Etsy seller, you can see it live here.

Etsy Create Shop Flow

Etsy's create shop flow, which keeps its marketplace growing, still looked like clunky web form from 1997. I rebuilt it to make it interactive with built in help functionality, and up to the aesthetic standard of the site. Here's Etsy's explanation of the flow. If you happen to be in the mood to open a shop, try it out!

8260CSFB SoC Android Power Management

What's that obscure mass of letters and numbers? 8260CSFB is the part number of a system-on-a-chip (SoC), or a whole computer on a single chip. It was the first Qualcomm GSM chipset to use a 4G LTE modem, which was a separate chip that talked to the main one and drew more power, so it took a lot of work to get power management under Android into a good state. Getting Android working right required making a whole ton of builds using Git, repo, and GCC; lots of code review via Gerrit, and huge amounts of debugging using tools like a Trace32 JTAG (to debug right on the the chip), a Spartan power-testing tool to view the power used by individual power rails on the chip, and writing custom Android test apps.

A big result was the HTC Vivid, the first LTE phone on AT&T, reviewed by Engadget as having "excellent standby power management"—precisely the feature I ensured was working at its highest.

BodyTrack Android App

I worked as a student and later a freelancer to start development on an Android app for the BodyTrack project, a centralized repository to store and upload health-related data. My app allowed the user to record and upload GPS locations, pictures of stimuli (like food), and meals eaten. Code is available on GitHub.

Android Apps

I've built a few other random small Android apps, some with code on GitHub:

Operating System and Thread Library

As part of Carnegie Mellon's legendary course 15-410 (Operating System Design and Implementation), I worked with a partner to build a preemptible multiprocess operating system kernel on x86. The operating system was implemented using another project from the course, a threading library of several primitives such as mutexes, monitors, and semaphores. Building these gave me a deep respect and understanding about how multiprocess computing works at a bare-metal level.