Mobile Applications
“The Bike Kollective”
Our team used Flutter/Dart SDK and NodeJS to make this app. I started on the front end since I didn’t have back end experience, which I didn’t expect to be a problem since someone else was handling the server and database. However, I quickly realized I needed a deeper understanding of the back end to interact with it. I learned about making requests, handling responses, and now I am building my own full stack applications. Check back here later to see what I come up with.
Source Code: https://github.com/ali-jal/The-Bike-Kollective
Web Applications
“Easy Chord Player”
With this JQuery app a user with no piano skills can play piano chords. The idea for an app to help singers practice recitative came from an opera singer who didn’t want to spend money hiring a pianist.It works with any song that needs chord accompaniment. In future versions, users may save chord progressions to a database, and share them with others.
Screenshot
(Click on the image to try it out.)
Demo Video
For this demonstration, I used “What’s Going On” by the alternative 90s band, 4 Non Blonds.
Source Code: https://github.com/DavidServias/chord_player
“COWculator”
The tasks of parsing the input and error handling were more involved than I first realized. Each button press needed to trigger some action that would vary depending on the state. In retrospect, I could have found a package, but at that time I didn’t know that was an option, so I did it all myself. The cow animations and sound effects were just for fun.
Source Code: https://github.com/DavidServias/calculator
(Click on the image to try it out.)
“Key Signature Game”
This game, made with JQuery, helps music students memorize key signatures. A music education specialist pointed out that memorization is an old-fashioned approach to teaching, to which I bristled, because she didn’t understand or appreciate the hours I spent writing the code. I now realize that was an important lesson. Only programmers care about the actual code. Users couldn’t care less about the code. They just want an app that works and is useful to them. You don’t need to know music theory to try it.
Source Code: https://github.com/DavidServias/Key-Signature-Game
(Click on the image to try it out.)
“Hands-Free Interval Game”
Music students can use this app for ear training practice. It uses a library called “Tone.js” and the Web Speech API. I now see some problems with the architecture. Instead of one God class that contains everything, it can be broken into smaller modules. The speech functions, an interval generator class, and a tone player class could all be abstracted out. Check back later to see an improved version of this project.
Source Code: https://github.com/DavidServias/interval_game
Screenshot
Video Demo
The video is 7 minutes long, but you only need 30 seconds to get the gist.
“Bernie Sanders Soundboard”
Here I used ReactJS and the web Audio API. A Bernie Soundboard seemed appropriate, since he’s known for repeating himself. Future versions can include custom sounds.
Source Code: https://github.com/DavidServias/DavidsDrumMachine
(Click on the image to try it out.)
Websites
My pianist/artist wife had definite ideas about the design and appearance of her website. I treated it like a paid job, but maybe I should have just charged her.
