Sam Dalton

Rails, Javascript, and all good things web related.

Shopt was a spinoff company from Vital Link, that aimed to capitalise on the technology that had been development and market it to a more commercial audience. My role was to further develop the application and turn it into a sellable SaaS product. I also helped to provide direction for the company, and its business decisions.

From a young age, I have been actively developing and designing websites and web applications. A large proportion of this work was carried out part time during secondary and tertiary education, however since finishing university, this has become a full-time endeavour. A sample of some of the applications built are:
· Hotel booking service for the snow covered Mt. Ruapehu in New Zealand

· CMS for local Bridge clubs to manage their tournaments and scores

· Foreign-language tutoring with comprehensive booking and text alert service

· A social network designed to encourage people to quit smoking - http://kick.it

· A location based voucher administration tool with mobile browser interface

The first three projects were built with PHP and MySQL, and the second two with
Ruby on Rails. The location based service made use of the Google Maps Javascript
API, and the services of SimpleGeo for location based calculations. Facebook
Connect and OAuth were used in the development of Kick.it to provide social
integration.

Freelance iOS Developer
The rapid rise of Apple's iOS platform has provided me with an opportunity to carve
a niche in New Zealand as a freelance iOS developer. Since beginning this
enterprise, I have come to enjoy and excel in the development, and have been
engaged in interesting and stimulating projects. Two of these include streaming
music for a radio station and a student timetable and staff directory application for
the University of Auckland. This work was carried out both part time during tertiary
study, and full time since completing university.

Intuto NZ is company that provides e-learning solutions to both academic
institutions and commercial businesses. Their .NET based LMS and content
authoring tools are world class, being used by Cambridge University in England. My
work with Intuto included developing improvements to the interface of their content
authoring tool, as well as develop custom iOS applications for learning English
vocabulary, IELTS test preparation, and a generic application that students could
use to purchase and download interactive courses on any course produced by their
authoring tool. This work was carried out as part of an 800 hour practical work
component of my engineering course.

Product development, IT strategies, server administration, business direction, R&D