Peyton Gasink

An open-source, personal project of mine, Bootstrap Toaster is a robust, plug & play generator for Bootstrap toast notifications. I designed it as a way to quickly and programmatically create Bootstrap toasts by abstracting the setup and maintenance from the developer. It features a variety of customization options including support for automatic light and dark theme detection, positioning in each corner of the viewport, elapsed time displayed on the toast, and different statuses to convey different meanings. It also has built-in support accessibility considerations for screenreaders, making it a perfect fit for institutions with accessibility requirements.

The goal of the project is to migrate all of our ASP .NET applications from being hosted on-prem to Azure App Service. My initial responsibilities include updating one of our class libraries and several blocking projects for hosting using Azure DevOps and Pipelines to lay the groundwork and establish a repeatable process for the rest of my team to follow.

So far this has been an extremely valuable learning experience for me. I have learned how to use Azure Pipelines for continuous integration, configuring and monitoring an app through Azure App Service, and hosting private NuGet packages within Azure Artifacts. Being on the front lines during Auburn's transition to cloud computing has been an awesome experience so far, and has challenged me in unique ways while allowing me to hit the ground running.

I began working on this project in October 2019 to create a proof-of-concept redesign of the School of Nursing's home page. A few months after completion, my team was contracted to go through with a redesign of the entire website in the style of my earlier work. The project's goal is to create a more captivating experience than what is currently in place on the current production version of the site. The site also features many customization options for administrators. Much of the content on the public-facing portions of the site is fully editable, and other data-driven features provide wizards for administrators to follow. The site features modern paradigms and interface metaphors such as a large hero units, cards, interactive widgets for news, upcoming events, podcasts, are some of the means by which we accomplished this goal. My personal contributions include the home page, and reusable components such as gesture-based site navigation, widgets for recent news and upcoming events, and rich content editors. The site's first phase launched in June 2020.

Led a team of six co-op students in adding new features to Auburn University's SGA Election web app to accommodate a new ranked-choice voting option for executive office positions. This required significant modifications to the database schema to allow for both traditional and ranked-choice options. In addition, stored procedures were created to calculate and distribute votes in each time candidates are removed at the end of a round. My work on the project consisted of a complete rewrite of the front-end and back-end code for casting votes to support both traditional and ranked-choice voting, since each election position could be configured to use either format.

Since the majority of students use their phones to vote for their candidate(s) of choice, my redesign was designed first-and-foremost for that use case. It features hierarchical menus for selecting candidates within grouped election positions. To fully take advantage of touchscreen use, the experience is gesture-based and makes use of drag-and-drop to rank candidates in the user's desired order.

Developed a news platform for any of our on-campus clients to use at the push of a button. It was built into a shared platform that all our applications are connected to, so enabling the news features would not require updates to individual apps. The news site provides customization options with pre-built HTML templates for news widgets, cards on the main news feed, and for articles, as well as an API for customized integration into sites.

My work on this project focused largely on creating the templates for articles and the main news feed. I wrote the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript required, and also added support for convenient features such as browser reader modes and social media share buttons. I also created pages where an app's admin(s) can view live previews of available templates and select their preferred options. Finally, I wrote a web API so any site could consume a news feed and create custom implementations, secured by an API key unique to each app's feed.

Worked as a member of a six-person team of co-op students to create a highly customizable web application for Auburn University's chapter of The BIG Event, which is a service organization that gives back to the local community one day every year through organized volunteer work. The system provides the ability to volunteer, create a job site request, assign volunteers to job sites, and allow administrators to track and notify participants of The BIG Event both leading up to and on the day of the event through emails, SMS messages, and live status board maps of the job sites.

My primary contributions include the ability to edit email templates to be sent programmatically by various other parts of the application. Each template includes placeholder variables that are replaced with actual data as the email is being sent. I also created the ability to volunteer for the event, where a user can volunteer individually, create/join a team, or select an organization to volunteer with.