About Brenton Fletcher

I work for Coupa as a Ruby on Rails developer, and I also create and maintain the projects you can find on this domain.

Languages

I work primarily in Ruby on Rails and Camping, along with JavaScript, HTML and CSS on the front end. I work with both Prototype and jQuery on the JavaScript front. I used to develop mostly in PHP, but that changed forever when I started working for Katalyst.

Personal Projects

Of the personal projects I have developed, these are the most popular. These projects are all free and open source.

RSS 2 HTML

RSS 2 HTML is a tool I started writing at the end of 2006 for embedding RSS feeds into web pages and styling them with CSS. The tool uses JavaScript, iframes, or PHP to embed the feed in the web page and gives the user options for customising the feed. These feeds are published through my own servers at no cost to users. Since I migrated servers in early 2008, RSS 2 HTML has constituted a majority of the traffic with over 10 million hits (as of 22 Jan 2010). The highest users of RSS 2 HTML have included:

Coderplay

Coderplay is my blog. It is aimed mainly at a developer audience, with posts on many programming and systems administration topics. You can also find details of all of my personal projects. Web stat reports tell me that it has at least 185,000 hits (I used to have a portfolio site, which had 200,000+ hits before being merged into the blog). My December 2008 report on the Adelaide protest against the governments internet filter were included in Slashdot and The Register.

JSON 2 HTML

JSON 2 HTML allows you to instantly view a string of JSON text as a set of nested boxes, corresponding to the objects, arrays and values in the JSON string. You can even have the page get the JSON string from a URL and automatically parse and display the string. JSON 2 HTML has received more than 870,000 hits since March 2008.

Games

KeyControl and ArrowKeyControl are my most popular games with AKC receiving in excess of half a million hits and KC over 260,000 hits to date.

WikiWatcher

WikiWatcher works by grabbing all the latest changes to Wikipedia (known as 'edits'), every 30 seconds and storing them on my server. When you visit WikiWatcher, it shows the latest 10 changes including the article that was edited and who made the change. Wikiwatcher has recieved over 50,000 hits. WikiWatcher was used as a teaching tool by Willow Dressel of Princeton University.

Other Open Source

You can find my other open source work on GitHub, (plus the source code to all the projects above), under the MIT License.

Systems Administration

I operate a VPS on Slicehost running nginx and rackup for my ruby applications, and Apache 2 and PHP for my PHP sites. I have administered this VPS since the beginning of 2008, and in that time it has served over 13.5 million requests.

Reviews

My work has been mentioned multiple times in media:

Nick Quaranto of Github Rebase #25 (2009) reviewed my application 'webstats'.

'webstats' is a Ruby-based web interface to monitoring your Linux web server's health. Install the gem, run webstats, and you're done. Currently, you can check out CPU usage, load average, memory usage, disk usage, and disk activity. This is a cheap way to implement monitoring if you're concerned about it, and it even comes baked in with an email and Growl notifier if something goes haywire.

German Mac Life Magazine (2008), reviewed my game widget KeyControl.

Download Squad (2008), reviewed an application I wrote for a laugh aged 13, 'Internet Explorer (IE) Retitler'. IE Retitler was also mentioned on Phillyist, a blog about Philladelphia.

Internet Explorer Retitler is small, simple, and does what it says. Open the program up, type in any title you want, and hit the "retitle" button. The next time you open Internet Explorer you'll see your new title in the title bar (along with whatever site you happen to be visiting).

Previous personal web site (from 2001-2004) was referenced in a conference paper by Johann Engelbrecht and Ansie Harding of the Department of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics, University of Pretoria, South Africa, (2004). The paper is now published with SpringerLink and was authored by Johann Engelbrecht and Ansie Harding of the Department of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

4. Exploration and demonstration sites containing mostly visual illustrations and animations in the form of Java-applets, perhaps including other material, not necessarily connected to a traditional undergraduate mathematics topic. These include interactive as well as investigative (mostly geometry) sites.

Examples: There is an abundance of sites with Java-applets e.g. that of Brenton Fletcher, who is a young Java programmer who sees himself as part of the 'net generation'. His site (6) is not specifically linked to any university or course and provides exploration opportunities for anyone interested.

Commercial work

At Coupa, I work with several other developers on their E-procurement and expense management product, one of the leading products in it's industry.

Previous work

While working for Katalyst Interactive I worked on a number of projects. These Ruby on Rails web applications I designed, developed and deployed while the sole developer at Katalyst:

AtlanticDVD was one of the most complex projects I'd worked on till starting at Coupa. I picked up the project early in development, and designed and developed the site into a web application with over 23,000 SKU's and these features:

I also built a number of Radiant CMS and BrowserCMS sites with heavy customisations:

When Katalyst gained more developers, I worked with them on these projects:

Katalyst Interactive (previously Katalyst Web Design) itself has won many industry awards, including the 2009 Atom Award for the web site that accompanied the SBS animation Figaro Pho. The animation Figaro Pho has itself been honoured with two 2009 Australian Film Inudstry (AFI) awards. Katalyst Interactive were finalists of the Australian Graphic Design Association National Awards (2008) and Bronze Medallists in the Adelaide Art Director Club Awards (2007). Bronze Medal was the highest result gained for Web Design.

Ancient history

I worked for ReNet before joining Katalyst. There I worked on their primary product, a web application (written in PHP) that enables Real Estate Agents to manage their listings. I built a bookings management system, and an appointments management system.

Previous to that, I was employed by Reed Construction Data, where I worked on multiple of their web applications, including a major optimisation of TendersConnect.