James Sun

In 2012—when the Internet of Things (IoT) was barely in its infancy—I served as the lead software developer for a team that completed a demonstration of a real-time, pedestrian monitoring system at Sakura Matsuri, a major street festival in Washington, D.C. The project was paid for with a grant via the Reliability IDEA program administered by the Transportation Research Board. The IDEA program funded proposals with the potential to test innovative ways to improve the consistency or dependability of travel times, improve travel time prediction, and provide information to travelers and other highway system users when dealing with unexpected delays.

The technical architecture consisted of five key elements: Bluetooth sensors, data server, messaging server, data publishers, and information consumers. PubNub served as the primary messaging backbone for our technical architecture. I developed a simple specification for how all messages should be formatted throughout the application. Once committed to the spec, the team could integrate publishers and subscribers very easily across various locations, platforms, and technologies.

I worked as the lead developer on a project integrating several different third-party web-based applications that support the admissions process at a leading U.S. graduate school. In addition to the day-to-day support of the various functional groups that use all three systems, I developed a series of automated tools and processes to integrate all three systems. The tools were developed using a variety of programs and languages (primarily on the Microsoft platform), including PowerShell, C# (custom command-line executables), SQL Server stored procedures (T-SQL), and Python.