Mark Harris

RECENT WORK

Skyfall Game for Hide & Seek - Software Architect, Developer

This was a web-based text-adventure game that coincided with the roll-out of the film Skyfall in Fall 2012.The game included a highly-scalable server architecture built on Amazon AWS. It is designed to handle any number of users, from 10 to 10 million. I architected the web-based software that manages player state through the game: including scoring, time-outs, success and failure and player communication.

I also created the front end Javascript “terminal” using JQuery+CSS to emulate a UNIX computer terminal.

The game communicated asynchronously with an AI chatbot on the back-end to create the illusion that players are interacting with another human being. The game also used open source audio matching technology to “unlock” the site via computer microphone.

This was built for Hide & Seek in London, and Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, OR.  The site is offline now, as the campaign only lasted for two months. http://hideandseek.net/projects/british-officer-intelligence-exam/

Architecture docs and code samples available upon request.

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Broadcastr - Director of Platform Engineering

At Broadcastr, I focused on development of the overall platform for delivering location-based rich media content via web and mobile app.

Duties included: The use of geocell-based spatial searches, developing an engine for weighting content based on user activity + location, designing a reusable system for liking, commenting, flagging, following any piece of content in the system, developing a GeoFencing system, free text search through Solr, and a custom OAuth2 provider. Additionally, I helped determine strategy for a public API to be used by external applications. Platforms included  GAE & AWS, tools include: Java, Solr, NginX. I left the company because it pivoted into a location-based news aggregator, something that didn’t line up with my individual interests.: http://www.getspun.com

Architecture docs and code samples available upon request.

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Applico Inc. - Mobile Developer

I worked on several Android apps for this mobile development company: an app for Texas Instruments, one for a company called ChaCha, and a special implementation of an e-reader called Blio for Scholastic.

My work on the e-reader involved pop-up games related to the stories in the books. I believe this implementation was proprietary to Scholastic and delivered OEM on specific devices. Android/Java. http://www.applicoinc.com

App links:

ChaCha

Texas Instruments

Scholastic

Architecture docs and code samples available upon request.

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SexyToiletParty: Dirty Location Checkin Service - Software Architect

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Pandemic 1.0 - Creative Technologist

For the Pandemic 1.0 Project, I wrote a software package that read social media interactions in real time, and used those to propel a story forward over 5 days at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

This software monitored various social graphs from Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, user polls, and location checkins, and translated that data into a fictional virus spread. This virus spread could be visualized in a central “mission control” room at the festival, and online. In addition, the project used IR tags attached to special Pandemic water bottles to “cure” people. When participants found these bottles around the festival, they brought them to mission control, set them on a Microsoft Surface table, and triggered a cure for the virus. My software package reacted to this and rolled the story back by the number of people “cured”, altering the visualizations in the room, as well as the actual progress of the story. The fun part about this was that the audience controlled the story. If enough people brought bottles to mission control, the virus would have been completely cured and the world saved. If no one brought bottles, the world was doomed.

This software was built on a LAMP stack, using a combination of asynchronous processes and robust caching system to ensure that it performed quickly and stably regardless of the number of players involved. This software, called DataStoryteller, can be deployed on any project, fiction or non-fiction to perform the same task; read social media and translate it into a story. It can power data visualizations. It can release assets at pre-determined times or points in the story, or in response to user interaction.

Architecture docs and code samples available upon request.