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If You May Be Interested In Hiring Me, Please READ THIS FIRST

Hello!

I’m assuming you’re reading this because you received my resume recently, or are at least remotely interested in seeing if I would be halfway decent at filling a position at your company. If that’s the case (and even if it’s not, I suppose), I’d like to personally welcome you to the site. Hopefully it will make you believe that I’m really good at what I do.

Here’s some more stuff that you may be interested in knowing:

I’m currently a senior at Northeastern University in Boston, which does mean that I’ve been here for five years. I did two co-ops, am majoring in two different things, have a minor, and feel like I definitely made the most out of my college life in Boston. I’ve enjoyed it so much, I think I want to stay in Boston.

As you’ve no doubt gathered, this site serves as my personal portfolio and online hub of all the stuff I find to be good enough to show off. I’ve very recently updated the contents of my portfolio, so definitely check that out to see some of the things I’m capable of doing. I’ve also been working hard on a fourth iteration of this site, but progress has slowed since school got back in session. Yes, I’m making excuses, but it should be reassuring to know that I’m working hard in school still, even after five years. Here’s a screenshot of the site so far, so you know I’m not kidding:

In addition to all of the goodies displayed here, I’ve also done some high-visibility work for a few companies; most notably, Second Nature and the Boston Globe. As a communications intern for Second Nature, I redesigned both the front and back-end of the resources section on their Drupal-run site, acupcc.org, to make the content more accessible and user friendly. I am also currently working for them to completely redesign their current company site using Drupal, in an effort to modernize their web presence and to make content creation simpler.

For the Globe, you can see my contributions in the search functionality on Boston.com (a complete JavaScript re-working using the custom Google Search API), as well as on the sports page of BostonGlobe.com during a live sporting event (updates to the JavaScript and back-end of the live scoreboard, which uses stats.com JSON data and some AJAX to update the scoreboard at one minute intervals).

So please, go check out what I’m capable of doing. I think you’ll find that my large range of material speaks to my ability to work well in many different mediums, as well as my aptitude for learning new technologies quickly. I’ll also encourage you to reach out at any time via email or by phone (860.849.0791) if you would like to hear more about my experience, skills, or interests. Or even just to chat. I’d also be happy to share with you some professional references so you know that I’m not just making stuff up.

I look forward to hearing from you.

October 24th, 2012
by braican

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Personal, Work
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Going Down Under

A week from Thursday, i’ll be getting on a plane to Australia. I’ll be landing two days later, eastern standard time, which I still find to be a pretty wild concept. Regardless, I’m crazy excited for the trip, which is exactly 4 weeks and will see me in Melbourne and Sydney.

The trip is a study abroad opportunity for me through Northeastern; I’ll be earning eight credits while there, studying, of all things, health psychology. Now while I can’t say how much I’ll learn about mental health, I can pretty certainly say that Australia as a whole is going to be an awesome experience that I’m not going to want to forget even the smallest bits.

Within this next week I’ll be setting up a quick and dirty blog for my adventures down under, the success of which is hard to predict given the infrequency of my posts on my regular blog. The idea is that I’ll be able to capture these moments for me personally while also recording what life is like in Australia (occasionally with some regard to mental health, probably), and how I can relate it back to life in the United States. I’ve always been intrigued by cultural differences, and this is my first real venture into another truly different environment. Hopefully someone besides myself will find it interesting.

In the meantime, if anyone’s got any good Australia tips, feel free to send them my way on twitter or via email.

June 27th, 2012
by braican

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Australia, Personal, School
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Brewery Journey

I really enjoy collections and record keeping: baseball cards, concert tickets, stats on my music-listening habits, and ballparks that I’ve visited, among many other things. I also really like beer, and visiting breweries. So I’ve decided to start a side project based around these interests.

Some friends and I went to Maine last weekend just to hang out on one of their lake houses on Panther Pond, an offshoot of Sebago Lake (which, in case you were wondering is in fact the SECOND largest lake in Maine, after Moosehead Lake. This was a point of contention on the trip). Since we were up there, we decided to visit the Allagash Brewery in Portland, a wonderful place that makes several delicious Belgian inspired beers. This was the third brewery trip for me in three days, as earlier in the week I visited two nano-breweries located in Everett: Night Shift Brewing and Idle Hands brewery, both of which are more than worth checking out. This sudden surge of tastings and brewing exposure left me feeling like I needed a way to collect the experiences.

This desire, along with having seen Pop Chart Lab’s awesome ‘Breweries of the United States’ poster, pushed the idea of a site that will allow users to check off breweries that they have been to, and see a visual representation on a map of their current journey. Of course, this experiment is as much for me to learn as it is for usefulness, as I’ll be able to delve into the Google Maps API, as well as work more with PHP and MySQL, which is how I’ll store the data.

Who knows where this will go, or how useful it will be, or how much I’ll learn, but I’m excited about the idea of being able to better track my brewery visits. There are a ton of breweries listed in the U.S., so I’ll definitely be starting in the Northeast and working my way down as time goes on; I get the feeling that inputting the data for the breweries is going to be the easy part.

A current goal of mine is to hit all of the Major League ballparks in the nation; I’ve been to 11. The idea that I will be able to get to all of the U.S. breweries listed is completely absurd, but the journey there will certainly be a blast. And hopefully I can make it better organized.

June 18th, 2012
by braican

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Miscellaneous, Personal
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A Meta Blog about Blogs

I used to think blogs needed to be in-depth, opinion-oriented game changers. They needed to prove something; assert the author’s viewpoint over the ignorant reader. That all posts needed to be well researched, well organized, and have a point.

Turns out, that’s not the case with most blogs on the internet. Most are personal viewpoints that give insight into the author’s lives. Which I think is actually pretty cool; it gives a personality to the website. So I’m going to try to write more like that because, after all, I’m probably not convincing anyone of anything anyway. At least not on a regular basis.

I’m pretty sure this post is proof of that.

June 9th, 2012
by braican

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Miscellaneous, Personal
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