Brian Vargas

Brian Vargas

A meek mild almost inarticulate little man in a constant condition of unworldly grease-coated dream like somnambulism.

Projects

I’ve been programming computers since I was five, and through that time I’ve done a lot of interesting projects. Most of them have been lost to the bit bucket of time, some of them survive within corporate walls, and a few of them are free for public consumption.

Please don’t consider this list exhaustive. There are many other things I’ve done over the years, and I can’t remember most of them.

Free Projects

These projects are free to download, execute, modify, and otherwise use. The license details can be found in the individual projects, but in general you can do whatever you want with them. Both of them are very out-of-date, and mostly useless, but are listed here for posterity.

Corporate Projects

As an employee and consultant, I worked on a lot of different projects for a lot of different customers using a lot of different technologies. The actual bits are not mine to distribute, though, and in some cases confidentiality agreements constrain the description. Regardless, the list can help give you an idea of what I’ve done in my life.

  • Apple – I have worked for Apple, Inc. since 2010 on back-end systems for the Apple Media Projects engineering team. My team and systems support numerous products, including Apple Music, the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+, amongst others.

  • AuthLite – AuthLite brings strong, affordable two-factor authentication to Windows networks. Featuring full integration with Active Directory, including support for ISA Server and RADIUS clients, AuthLite makes it possible for businesses to replace ineffective password policies with AES-encrypted one-time passwords using the Yubikeys.

  • Chronicling America – My time at the Library of Congress has been spent working on digital repository systems, and the National Digital Newspaper Program is the public-facing side of that repository. Take a peek at the Digital Libraries category for some in-depth information.

  • Common architecture pieces of a large-scale web-services interface for home mortgage processing, written in C#. This includes authentication, authorization, and exception handling and logging. (Avanade)

  • Critical components of a high-throughput multi-threaded home mortgage loan processing engine, written in C#. This includes implementing the threading model, the thread pool, profiling and tuning the application code. (Avanade)

  • Implemented a custom user-interface for a home automation product for GE Smart. The system was written in C# during the .NET Beta period, and required highly-customized UI widgets. I fully implemented the scroll bars, developed code to round the window edges, and various other UI tasks. (Geneer)

  • Developed a specialized online marketplace for Argent Trading, customized for their unique business model. Introduced this new-fangled thing called “XML” to the company via this project. (Geneer)

Lost Projects

These projects are long gone, may they rest in peace.

  • Grade tracking program for the TI-85 calculator. Allowed entry of test and homework scores, and would calculate your expected grade for the class, while storing the data in the TI-85’s volatile memory.
  • Mr. Victor – My first program ever, written in BASIC when I was but five years old on a Commodore VIC-20. It would ask, “Are you angry?” If you typed, “No,” it would respond “Well, that’s good.” If you entered “Yes,” the machine would chastise you “Well you shouldn’t be!”

Other Sites

I make updates to other sites and blogs, some of them more often than others.