Difference between revisions of "User:ThePlaz"

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Biography

Michael Plasmeier is a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, pursuing a double major in both Management Science (15) and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (6-2). Michael bridges the divide between computers and people - more interested in how technology can be used to help people's lives rather than the raw math behind them. Michael has experience in both web development and designing user interfaces as well as managing a team and business strategy.

MIT

At MIT, Michael is involved in many activities. In his first semester, Michael became a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab where he developed Facebook applications and user interface concepts for use in research projects. Michael also got a campus job as a Residential Computing Consultant, a position in the Information Services and Technology department offering front line support to students in his dorm. Michael was also elected VP of Facilities and Services in his dorm where he has a $6,000/year budget to maintain the stock of common rooms and loanable equipment.

Michael is also active in student government on campus. In freshmen year he was the undergraduate rep on the committee to evaluate changes to the Athena and printing systems. The institute has already implemented some recommendations, and is working to implement the rest. Michael also served as a representative on the Institute committee to award the new House dining contract (worth ~$4 million/year) putting him in the center of the largest political conflict on campus.

In freshmen year, Michael participated in a Entrepreneurship and China seminar.

Michael is concentrating in Science, Technology, and Society as a humanities concentration.

Deutsche Bahn

In the summer of 2010, Michael worked at Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned railway of Germany. Michael worked in the Project Mobility/Touch&Travel department, under the "Innovations Manager" for NFC (Near Field Communications). Michael worked with him to extend NFC acceptance across other Deutsche Bahn departments, as well as Germany-wide, including taking part in meetings with partners and vendors. Michael also designed the system architecture for new form factors of Touch&Travel, as well as the look of the smartphone interface. Michael also prototyped (mockups) and developed (PHP, MySQL, HTML, JS/AJAX) a concept for pulling data together from different data "silos" within the Bahn to give consumers quick access to data to make their trip easier.

NextJump

In the summer of 2011, Michael worked at NextJump in product development. NextJump provides corporate perks portals to much of the Fortune 500.

High School

Michael graduated from Haverford High School with a 4.7 out of 4.0 GPA. In later years he was a regular anchor of H-Vision, the school’s morning news program. Michael supports education for all, through his website, ThePlaz.com, where he has several thousands sheets of knowledge, freely available to all with a connection to the internet. Michael's passion for knowledge enables him to excel in school. Among Michael's peers, he has earned a reputation for hard work. In his freshman year, the yearbook staff chose Michael to be the section cover page of the "Academics" section title page.

Web Projects

GridView

Michael developed several websites and web projects while in high school. The most notable among them was GridView. GridView was an application for Facebook which let users display of their friends' profile photos on their own Facebook profile. Michael got the idea for GridView on the last day of 10th Grade, "What does the name Facebook mean? There is no place to see everyone's face." Michael used his newfound free time to experiment with the newly announced Facebook platform. Very quickly the application became popular, with the number of users snowballing. Michael attributed GridView's success to Facebook's Newsfeed which spread word about the application, as well as its visibility on user's profiles. "I think the cleanness of the design attracted users to it. I tried to keep it clean and usable, without all of the ads everywhere."

Michael attracted some light angel funding for the project and a minority partner who brought years of experience in the industry. Together they started building up GridView. Michael designed a "rearrange" flash applet for GridView and then put it out for bid. For the month as the flash application was being developed, Michael got up at 5AM every day before school to manage the overseas development team building the project. Michael also hired and managed an independent domestic developer.

GridView grew to over 1,300,000 users. Unfortunately in 2008, Facebook changed the layout of the profile and the usage of GridView fell precipitously. GridView was essentially profile artwork - when Facebook changed the profile the art work become hidden. We tried twice to build a second act, when we acquired my business partner's old firm ForumsPlace and building a petitions platform 4Change. Unfortunately I did not have the time to dedicate to the projects and they never got any traction. I think the timing of the economy had a lot to do with it, GridView's revenue was mostly from other app developers waving VC cash advertising their applications. However the Facebook bubble burst and the entire economic environment became a lot more challenging. Still, I personally made a profit from the venture, and I gained far more experience than other experiences high schoolers.

Others

Michael also produced Tecker 911, a video podcast to help people with basic technological concepts. The show was shot in Michael's house by a team of his friends. Michael led the team, diving out the duties to write, host, shoot, and edit the episodes. The shows were also shown on the local public access cable TV station. 100 episodes were ultimately produced over the 3 years. One of the former participants went on to major in new media production.

Michael developed an open-source application. SeniorQuoter, a free, open-source PHP application allows high school yearbooks to collect senior quotes. Michael wanted to start an open-source project to give back to the community. In 11th Grade, Michael led a 5 person group study at Haverford High School where the group, under Michael's supervision, learned PHP and MySQL and built version 2 of SeniorQuoter. A few yearbooks have adopted SeniorQuoter, but Michael was most proud of the team work which brought version 2 together and the UI/design Michael designed and implemented.

One project which was less successful was Dictionary Robot. Dictionary Robot's goal was to make it easy for students to do vocabulary lists. Michael tried to implement the feel of AJAX applications sliding around, but he was never able to get the front end or the back end to work.

In the summer of 2008, Michael grew frustrated with the new map that Flickr released and he set out to build his own. He also wanted to gain more experience with JavaScript, so he designed Geoov which displays all of his flickr photos on a map at one time. Geoov uses the MarkerCluster to display over 20,000 markers on the map at once.

Over the summer of 2009, Michael designed a new skin for my website "Nuvola." Michael first fell in love with the Nuvola icon set in 2006 and he sketched a first design for the site then. "It was a lot of work to upgrade the look of MediaWiki because years of subtitle accumulated modifications in MediaWiki make the code hard to decipher. It also required a lot of CSS trickery to get it to work in all of the major browsers." Michael also implemented a lot of the Yahoo! Speed optimization tricks into the site - such as image sprites - significantly improving page load. In addition, Michael implemented server-side caching with Memcached. Since then I have also made a few more extensions to MediaWiki.

In middle school and early high school Michael made a lot of programs for the TI-83+ graphing calculator. This was Michael's first exposure to programming. "Looking back the syntax was very basic - but I could build really simple program while sitting in the car."

Transparency

Michael posts a great deal of what he does to his website. Furthermore, much of his work is freely available under the Creative Commons license. For example, over 50,000 of his photos are online and licensed under the Creative Commons license. Michael is also the technology manager for the publications department.

Acting

In middle school and early high school Michael was involved in both acting and behind the scenes in both school and professional theater. He was in three shows while he was at Haverford Middle School, stage managed a fourth, and was a casting consultant for a fifth. Through the People’s Light and Theater Company’s youth school, he has performed at the National Constitution Center in downtown Philadelphia. Michael also volunteered at People's Light in the lighting department.

Resume

Websites

GridView

GridView [1] is an application for Facebook which lets users put all of their friends on their profile and makes a photo mosaic of themselves with their friend’s photos. GridView has over 440,000 users, of which >30,000 use it each day.

I recently brought on a partner to GridView in order to seek monetization strategies and provide a small investment. Together we agree that GridView is worth more than $125,000.

Users have told me that the reason they like GridView is because of the design. GridView has also forced me to learn about building scalable website which does tens of thousands of page views a day. It has also gotten me involved in the business aspect to try and build a profitable website.

SeniorQuoter

SeniorQuoter [2] is an installable PHP application which lets high school yearbooks streamline their senior quote collection process. SeniorQuoter is freely licensed under the GNU GPL.

In the second quarter of the 2007-08 school year, I lead a group study at my school to instruct 4 students in building dynamic websites with PHP and MySQL. After we learned the skills, we put them to use developing the admin interface for version 2 of SeniorQuoter.

Tecker 911

Tecker 911 [3] is a video podcast which shows ordinary people how technology can help their ordinary lives. Tecker 911 is also shown on Haverford’s local cable public access channel, bringing the show to tens of thousands of people.

Tecker 911 is great community service, since we bring technology education to the both residents of Havertown and over the internet, the world.

Tecker 911 is also great leadership experience for me. The show is shot over the weekend in my living room. I coordinate all of the shoots, equipment, writing, and editing. Tecker 911 has 6 regular contributors.

Tecker

Tecker [4] is a social question and answer service I wrote in PHP during 10th Grade. Although Tecker never caught on with the public, it was very helpful for me in developing my coding skills and researching online communities. The skills I learned working on Tecker have helped me work on GridView and SeniorQuoter.

ThePlaz.com

ThePlaz.com [5] is my main website. It a centralized repository of what I am up to. It also servers as a place to store my smaller projects, such as pure CSS dropdowns for MediaWiki and applications for the TI-83+ calculator. I also post up educational resources which I hope will benefit others.

ThePlaz.com served up more than 80,000 page views in 2007, and has about 4,000 pages of content. I also have over 7,000 of my photos on flickr. Most of my photos and work on ThePlaz.com is licensed under a Creative Commons license, allowing reuse (for non commercial purposes).

Dictionary Robot

Dictionary Robot [6] is an upcoming website which lets students look up multiple words at a time in an online dictionary. This will revolutionize the way students make vocabulary lists.

The Physical World

• I was part of my school’s FIRST robotics team last year, and was one of the few newbies who traveled to the competition in Annapolis, Maryland. This year, I am in charge of the team’s website.
• I am a regular host and contributor to H-Vision, my school’s morning news program. Last year, I was a regular sound engineer for the show. I have since passed this job on to younger members to concentrate on appearing in front of the camera.
• I have many years of theater experience, steaming mostly from my involvement with the Haverford Middle School Theater Co. and People’s Light and Theater Company, a professional theater, in Malvern, PA. In middle school I was the stage manager for the 6th Grade production of Wonderland! with about 100 participants. In 2004, I acted at the Constitution Center in one of the only 2 youth shows ever performed there. Backstage, I volunteer in the lighting department at People’s Light.
• I am also involved with policies regarding technology at my school. I have a deep relationship with the director of technology and the principal of my school. We meet almost every month to discuss upcoming programs and policies. For example, this month I am trying to change Haverford’s policy regarding student brought laptops and PDAs.

Mini Resume

See Mini Resume

Personal Info

Activities

• H-Vision (sound and anchor)
• Robotics Club
• volunteer in People's Light lighting department
• develop Tecker
• run ThePlaz.com

Interests

• Computers (GUI, coding, PHP, MySQL)
• Technical Theater
• Academics
• Leadership

Favorite Music

• Soundtracks Mostly
• Some Pop
• Some classical (while working)

Favorite TV Shows

Involved In

• H-Vision
• Tecker 911

TV Mainstream

• The Amazing Race
• Survivor
• Avatar:The Last Airbender
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide

TV Niche

• How it's Made
• Beyond Tomorrow
• The Screen Savers

Computer

• tWiT Network Podcasts
• DL.TV
• Cranky Geeks

Favorite Movies

(Don't get to watch too many movies)

• The Incredibles and all other Pixar movies except Finding Nemo
• The Harry Potter Series

Favorite Books

Non-Fiction

• Branded Nation (& others by James Twitchell)
• Fast Food Nation

Fiction

• Harry Potter Series
• Alex Rider Adventures

... and more

Favorite Quotes

See Quotes

Accounts on other sites

• wp:User:Michael180 on Wikipedia (and some other wikimedia sites)
• ThePlaz on Digg!
• michael180 on 43 Things
• michael180 on43 Places
• theplaz on Flickr
• theplaz on Bookmooch
• Facebook
• theplaz on YouTube
• LinkedIn

From my Governor's School Application

See Governor's School Application

GridView: Successful FB Application

As I detail on my resume, I run several web projects of varying types and of varying successfulness. GridView [7], my application for Facebook, is my most successful project. It has between 30,000 and 60,000 users a day. GridView is a great opportunity to get my work seen by thousands of people and also to learn what it is like to run a web business. I recently sold 25% of it to someone who became my partner in return for his advice (he is also the director of ad operations at a major social network) and a small investment. Together we think that GridView is worth more than $125,000. This is a great opportunity for me to receive some funding to cover the costs, learn how to run a business, and make a profit from my skills. However, I have learned a lot about building scalable websites and Linux server administration.

Tecker 911: Leadership in Community Television and Podcasting

Tecker 911 [8] shows my leadership skills. I am the producer and director of the show and organize everything from the people to the equipment to the editing. Each episode takes about 4 hours of my time in total. I organize all of the ideas, assign writers to brainstorm episodes, set up shoot times, as well as borrow the necessary equipment. During the shoot I host many of the episodes and direct the other hosts in their hosting style (as I point out in my resume, I have years of theater experience and also host my school’s morning news show). I also created all of the branding and editing standards for Tecker 911. This all pays off by helping to educate my community in something I know well, technology. Because the show is shown on our cable network, many people from my community recognize me from Tecker 911.

SeniorQuoter: Leadership in Free Software Coding and Project Management

I am also the project manager and leader for SeniorQuoter [9]. I founded SeniorQuoter to help my yearbook, but I chose to make the code freely available to everyone under the GPL license. As I detail on my resume, I also lead a group study in my school in PHP and MySQL. For the group study, I outlined the jobs and delegated them to my programming team I trained earlier in the quarter. I then supervised their work and helped them when they needed it. This was a great experience for me to work on my instructing and managing skills.

So Much More Than A Coder

Although I am the primary coder for my projects, I have also created all of the logos, branding, and user experience. I see myself more interested in human-computer interaction and project management than being a straight programmer. I mentioned that I do all of the branding and design for my sites. People have told me that superior design is the reason they use GridView over its competitors. As the director of my projects, I also think about the broader implications of technology. Technology is also at the point where it is turning around society. The worries about privacy on Facebook hit home for me, as I must protect the data of hundreds of thousands of users. My favorite topics in school revolve around human interaction, as the letter from my AP Economics and American Studies teacher indicates. (Also I did an extensive paper and video on Globalization)

In Summation

So, it is critical that I attend the Governor’s school because the topics being discussed are critical to me now. GridView’s hundreds of thousands of members demand not only server up-time, but a cohesive and engaging user experience which fits into the framework of Facebook. I am not only a programmer, but a designer, project manager, and on-air personality. I have extensive experience in managing teams of people, both for coding and television production. I know how powerful technology can be. Thus, I feel that I would be an asset to the Governor’s School in Technology.

My ThePlaz.com Userboxes

See also my wikipedia user boxes.

This user is a member of the MCM Club.

484	This user is a member of the Haverford High School Robotics Club!

This user goes to Haverford High School.

This user is an employee of Tecker.

Contact Me

Leave Plaz a (public) message or send me a (private) e-mail.