My passion for web development was ignited in 2008. I was working for the Department of Transportation at the University of Maryland as a bus driver. I had been a bus driver, a training manager, and the operations manager for UMD to make extra money as an undergraduate. When I graduated from Maryland and was preparing to enter my Ph.D. program at the University of Arizona, I acquired a position as a full time bus driver to make ends meet. However, as the summer started there was not enough work and most of the bus drivers were simply paid to watch movies in a lounge. Although this probably sounds like a perfect job, I was bored and I wanted to contribute to the betterment of the organization.

I realized over the years I worked there that there were two student half-time management positions (a total of 40 hours a week) dedicated primarily to entering data from paper forms into excel spreadsheets to generate graphs and other descriptive statistics. The inefficiencies of this process had always frustrated me. So I approached a manager and asked if it would be ok for me to learn how to develop an online infrastructure for entering data and automatically generating the relevant reports. In other words, I wanted to cut out the middle men. He agreed and I began to learn how to code PHP, HTML, and MySQL to create the online forms and automated reports. Within two months we had a fully functioning software package that moved 90% of the paperwork online and automated several reports.

I left further development of the software to an undergraduate employee of UMD and headed off the the University of Arizona. While at the UofA, I continued to work on developing websites for research collaboration, statistical analyses, online experiments, and surveys. I also dabbled in web consulting work building e-commerce sites and mobile web applications. But, my primary focus during this time was the Ph.D. program which exposed me to a variety of research methodologies, statistical analyses, and management best practices.

In my third year I was able to combine my research and web development acumen via the development of the OrionShoulders project. I was working on a meta-analysis. For those of you who are not familiar with meta-analyses it is basically a research process that involves aggregating all of the research that has investigated the relationship between variables. For example, there have been thousands of studies investigating the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Due to a variety of technical issues including sampling bias and methodological artifacts some of the studies suggest that the relationship between smoking and lung cancer is very high (r > .70) and others reveal that the relationship is very low (r > .10). Meta-analyses attempt to account for the biases in each of these studies to determine the “true” (at least more true) relationship between these variables. Meta-analyses also help researchers to understand why the relationship is sometimes relatively high and sometimes relatively low.

While working on my first meta-analysis, I quickly realized that the available research tools were antiquated. Everyone was still using excel spreadsheets. This was not practical for researchers who were often working within geographically distributed teams and were beginning to develop more advanced research questions that required more sophisticated analytical tools. To address this issue I began to develop a web application for a meta-analyses that would address these issues. Little did I know that a few years later the project would evolve into a full functioning website with more than 750,000 lines of code, a small business, and solidify my interest in becoming a web developer.

As I continued to work on Orion Shoulders, I realized that I could not take my eyes off of the computer screen until I made something awesome happen (even though sometimes this just meant making a string of numbers and digits appear on the screen). As I completed my Ph.D. I decided to search for a job in Web Development rather than Academia and secured my first professional position working as a contractor at the Naval Research Lab. Over the past year, I have designed and developed a number of complex business applications and have maintained several other legacy projects. I have also worked to redevelop the OrionShoulders project using Yii2, AngularJS, Twitter Bootstrap, and the Codeception Testing Suite. All of these technologies have also been applied to my NRL projects. I am constantly learning new technologies and looking for new avenues for creating websites that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization through both form and function. If you are interested in learning more about my background please view my cover letter and resume. You can contact me at samuel.birk@gmail.com

Best,

Sam Birk