Development Work

Once-a-year Berkeley hosts a 24-hour event for fundraising, giving donors a chance to directly support their favorite campus units. The event focuses on supporting campus initiatives in a fun and social media-friendly way.

There were a lot of challenging parts of this project. One of the main features of the site was that it had to mimic the time-based changes in the event itself. There were three phases set up and the site could completely change content at each phase. The event started with "pre" phase, which included content and a countdown clock, which led right up until the "day-of" phase. That's when all the giving began and followed 24-hours later by a "post" phase.

The countdown clock on the front page had to count down, then for day-of, count the next 24-hours. We also had a mini-countdown clock running synchronously on our Berkeley Give website. We switched content automatically on both sites near simultaneously.

The leaderboards page was where the primary action took place, displaying real-time updates on giving totals both for the units participating in contests, as well as the overall totals. The data started out as Microsoft SQL for the first revision of the site, and thereafter moved to Python provided JSON endpoints.

The site featured third party social media aggregator integration from a major platform, pixel-accurate design-to-code, and responsive design, all of which made the Big Give a huge success in raising millions for the University. I am very proud of all the hard work the team put in to make that site work flawlessly.

This site has changed platforms since my foundational Ember.js work.