About

Cliff's notes version

Senior engineer and project lead at Palantir.net. Graduate of Northwestern University in computer science. Web development is my jam. Obsessed with the Great State of Ohio. Lover of God, family and friends.

I'm a 25 year old senior front-end web developer at Palantir.net. I'm from Morral, Ohio – a rural farm town in north-central Ohio, about an hour north of Columbus. After high school, I made the trek to the big city of Chicago to attend Northwestern University, studying computer science in the McCormick School of Engineering.

I've been fortunate to be able to work with some awesome people in the field of web development. During school, I worked at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University as a front-end developer, and I've also interned at Palantir.net – where I now have a full-time position – and Blue State Digital in Washington DC.

I got interested in technology at a young age. One of my favorite memories is of helping to unwrap my family's first PC while I was in kindergarten. It progressed from there. At age 11, I built my first computer and then started teaching myself how to make the computer do what I wanted it to do.

I started with HTML and then moved to C++ and Visual Basic over time. During college I learned about all sorts of things: computational complexity, artificial intelligence, crowd sourcing, social computing, computational photography and machine learning just to list some of my favorites. I enjoy all things computer science related but especially enjoy what I learned first – web development.

I'm happy wherever technology and people intersect: as a desktop programmer, web developer, user interface designer, or mobile app developer. If people are interacting with technology, I want to be involved.

The Great State
of Ohio

Northwestern
University

Work

The Claretian Initiative

http://claretianinitiative.org/

I served as the sole developer for the creation of this site while at Palantir.net for an internship. The site is responsive and mobile friendly. It is built in Drupal. The Claretian Initiative (tCI) is a network of Community Development programs in high-poverty urban neighborhoods in the U.S. and are using the site to galvanize donations.

Roads to Business

http://r2b.northwestern.edu/

I created a custom Wordpress theme to mimic the design for sites built using Northwestern's full-featured Cascade CMS. The Wordpress theme offers small departments and programs with a simpler interface. Multiple settings pages were created to provide an easy interface for university officials who are unfamiliar with Wordpress.

Coalition to Protect America's Healthcare

http://protecthealthcare.org/hospital-heroes-nicu

I built a responsive page in ExpressionEngine during my time at Blue State Digital. The page makes use of the YouTube API and serves to tell a story through emotional video segments.

Chemistry Department Calendar

http://www.chemistry.northwestern.edu/about/events/department-calendar.html

The Chemistry Department at Northwestern University has many events each month combined from many sub-calendars within the department. The university has a custom calendar platform but displaying events on a website is limited. I combined data from the university's calendaring system with the FullCalendar Javascript library to create a responsive calendar solution for the department.

People for Bikes

http://www.peopleforbikes.org/get-local

I expanded the map functionality for an existing client during an internship at Blue State Digital. The existing map was slow to load due to an excess of database queries. Using a custom database query, I was able to cut the page load time significantly while doubling the content on the page. I also created a mobile-friendly view and added A-Z jump navigation to the page.

Business Institutions Program

http://www.bip.northwestern.edu/

The Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences unveiled a new school-wide theme built in Cascade CMS. I extended this base theme to fit the needs for a specific department, including optimizing the page for mobile.

Résumé

Here's the quick version:

Senior front-end developer at Palantir.net.
Graduate of Northwestern University studying Computer Science (GPA 3.92 of 4.00)
Front-end development internships at Palantir.net and Blue State Digital
Knowledgeable with lots of fun things: HTML, CSS (and Sass), JavaScript, jQuery, Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, mySQL, C, C++, ember.js, Angular.js and Ruby on Rails
All around cool guy (according to most people)

The long version: a super fresh copy of my résumé

PatrickWeston