Cruity – The Free Applicant Tracking System

Around 20 minutes ago I just enabled Cruity.com to be available for anyone to sign up to use. This has been a project I have been working on in my spare time for over a year now staying up very late at night and using every available hour at the weekend to work on it.

Cruity

What is Cruity?

It is an hiring platform. People apply for your job on Cruity.com it then provides a very easy way for you to sort and review the applicants who have applied to your job. It has already been used by over 25 high profile companies in Silicon Valley already in the private beta which is quite a nice achievement for it to have.

For people applying for jobs I have tried to make it as easy as possible for them to use.

Why Did I create it?

I was part of the interviewing team for the silicon valley internship programme. The software we were using was pretty terrible and it did not save us any time at all especially because we were dealing with hundreds of applicants. So I knew there had to be a way to do this. As a result I used my web development skills learned new cutting edge technology to create it. I have learned a lot over the year while making it and will learn more as I continue to improve it.

This is only just the beginning of the adventure of Cruity.

I hope all the people that are just accepting job applications through emails will decide to use this instead as there is significant value gained from it.

If you need free applicant tracking software head over to cruity.

If you have any feedback please feel free to contact me and I will help you with your request. You can contact me using the information on this page

Open Sourced Dungeon Crawler

So I decided to open source my dungeon crawler game that I made a while ago. My original plan was to develop it further and make it into yet another Xbox indie game available for download.

However time was always a problem while I was at university so I never got around to completing it. I hopefully one day however will return to complete a similar like game but I wont be making it in C# or reusing any of that code. (Except maybe the level generator, that was pretty incredible if do say so myself).

Feel free to use any of the code or any of the art.

https://github.com/Stewart-Taylor/DungeonCrawler

The main components of the game which you will want to look at are.

The Level generator ( All levels are created through clever procedural techniques)
The particle effect system.
The character sprite animation system. ( All characters are created from individual parts. So you can cut off legs, arms,etc)

If you have any questions about the source code feel free to email me. Be warned though it is a bit messy.

Also I plan to open source a lot more of these small projects that I have worked on, in the hopes that it is useful to someone else.

Dundee University press and YSE award

The computing department at the university of Dundee wrote a little article about after winning 3rd place at the Scottish young software engineer of the year awards.

Applied Computing Graduate secures 3rd Place in ‘Young Software Engineer of the Year’ Awards

Shortly after graduating this year with a BSc in Applied Computing, Stewart Taylor was awarded 3rd place at the ScotlandIS ‘Young Software Engineer of the Year’ awards.

ScotlandIS is a trade body for the ICT sector that represents approximately 200 technology and software related businesses in Scotland. The awards are allocated to computer science and software engineering students in Scotland, who completed exceptional undergraduate software projects.

The University of Dundee nominated Stewart for his strong final year project. His project provided a visual demonstration of path planning which will be used by the Space Systems Research Group to showcase their work for outreach. Stewart’s portfolio of work includes a number of mobile phone applications, and games that he developed and published for the Xbox indie marketplace. We are delighted to hear the news of his success, particularly as Stewart was competing against nominees from 12 other universities.

Stewart gained a number of accolades whilst studying. As part of a team in 2012, he received 1st place in the ‘Yahoo! Hack Day Dundee’ competition, and he was awarded a medal for top student in Applied Computing Level 3. Stewart also recently participated in the ESA App Camp 2013, as one of 20 selected participants from across Europe. His undeniable academic success has led to a new and exciting career as a Software Engineer for ‘LoopUp’, a teleconferencing start-up based in San Francisco. His parents collected his award on his behalf as he was en route to his new life in North America.

http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/newsandevents/newsdetail.asp?1044

Winning the award got me this nice little trophy and a very generous cash prize. I could not attend the event however as it was taking place while I was actually on the plane to San Francisco.

http://www.scotlandis.com/news/stories/exceptional-students-lift-software-awards

Arrived in San Francisco

Last Thursday I touched down at San Francisco International airport. The reason for this is because of a scheme called the Silicon Valley Internship Programme. The programme’s goal is to get recent computer science graduates from the UK into jobs in start-ups in Silicon Valley. I managed to nab a position in a conferencing company based in the heart of San Francisco called LoopUp. The founder of the SVIP also happens to be the founder and Co-CEO of LoopUp as well.

The first thing to notice after coming out of the airport was the temperature, it is definitely a significant change from the cold lands of Scotland. However there was a strange fog that was lurking around the area but it went away after time. The re-appeared a few times.

Once the interns were through border control and had our bags we all headed off to the “Hacker House” which is basically a glorified hostel for people working in tech. The place seems quite nice and it is a great way to get to know the other interns. Just don’t expect to being living comfortably there however. The place has its great advantages but also its many disadvantages.

Once all the guys were settled into the Hacker house the whole SVIP group then headed out to the local burrito place. At the place I got the medium burrito, which was absolutely massive. I knew American portions were big but I still was not expecting that.

The next day was a lot more exciting, the group went to the LoopUp office were SVIP is based and got to meet the Programme founder Mike Hughes, who then gave us a nice introduction to the programme and told us what the programme had planned for us lucky interns over the course of the year. There was also some boring paper work as well…

After Lunch at this really nice Italian restaurant we went to a San Francisco based manufacturing start up called Rick Shaw bags. There we got to meet Mark Dwight the founder and CEO of Rick Shaw, he was a really cool guy, really optimistic. Mark gave us a tour of his factory which is based in quite a nice area of San Francisco. We also got to at the endof the tour/talk design our very own personalized SVIP zero bags, which we will receive in a few weeks’ time. (Don’t worry I’ll put a picture up once I get it). Overall it was a great experience, personally I think it was a bit more exciting getting a tour of a manufacturing facility rather than an office. That might be however that one of my interests is combing technology with physical products/objects. (See honours project, previous job).

After the tour and talk at Rick Shaw we went for a bit of a pub crawl around the Dogpatch area of San Francisco,which apparently used to be an old ship building area of San Francisco. It was great fun however the bars were not to fantastic and the beer quite frankly does not taste as good as European beer. The great thing however was it gave me a great opportunity to get some amazing pictures of San Francisco’s financial district, such as the one below.

Over the weekend everyone decided to go out and be “touristy”. During the weekend I visited the famous pier area. It was the labour day weekend as well, so it was very busy and packed with other tourists as well. I visited the famous pier 39 which was covered in some very large sea lions. It was strange they looked very out of place In San Francisco. I also managed to see the golden gate bridge as well, which was a bit different from what I was expecting. Due to it being completely covered in fog.

The first day was kind of interesting we got a standard introductory meeting giving us insight into the company, the product and the structure of the start up. I also got to find out about the investors of the company which was quite interesting as well.

After that us new interns went for launch and went exploring for a couple of “blocks”. When we came back we spent most of the day getting our new workstations set up with the necessary software.

It will be interesting to see what the rest of the year has in store for me and the rest of the SVIP interns.

ESA AppCamp 2013

Earlier on this year I got selected as one of twenty participants to participate in the European space agency’s app camp. The goal of the ESA app camp is for mobile developers to create apps for normal people using the satellite data available from ESA.

I attended the app camp in June and it was absolutely amazing I learned a lot about the European space agency but I also learned lots from the very talented mobile developers that were also there.

Me at ESRIN

The goal of the camp is to form an international team of four and at the end of the camp produce an app. As part of the camp I was placed in the “Observe and Learn” team, a team focused on creating an educational android app. The app we developed is called LifeRama.

The demonstration version of the application is also available now.

Unfortunately our team never won but put that down to the app idea being too awesome for them to comprehend. However the experience of being there was much better than the prize that was on offer.

AppCamp press release: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/GMES/App_Camp_creates_new_ideas_for_using_satellite_data

I would highly recommend any mobile developer to sign up for next year’s event.

http://www.app-camp.eu/

Dynamic Pathfinding In Unknown Terrain

I have nearly completed my honours after many months of work. My initial idea was to keep this website updated with its progress but it was such a busy year I had very little time to do so.

The completed system uses the D star search algorithm and simulated planetary data from the University of Dundee’s space research groups PANGU system. The simulation runs in real time and it is possible to see the rovers map update in real time as well as being able to have a view of what the rover sees.

The image above shows the rover safely traverse a 10485m² region. As the rover moves along it uses its simulated sensors to retrieve data about it’s environment. Using the D star search algorithm is it able to successfully make alterations to it’s current path on the fly without having to perform a brand new search. This saves a lot of time and is especially good with very large regions.

The system can run comparison simulations using different path finding algoirthms and compare results.

Once I have completed my project at the start of May I plan to write up a section on this website which goes into detail about the project, how it works etc.I also plan to make a video of the system in action. The interface has a stage progression system which is kind of difficult to show in images plus it would be nice to be able to see the system working in real time.

Disparity Maps

For one of my university modules I was required to create Disparity Maps from stereo image pairs. I quite enjoyed doing this image processing as It was more enjoyable than the usual tasks I get given. I also got to use MatLab which I had never used before and actually quite enjoyed it, especially with all the quick features it includes.

Here is a few examples of what the project I was working on can do on a stereo image pair of the pentagon.

MatLab makes its fairly easy to plot 3D objects. Unfortunately however there is still some noise being picked up by the algorithm.

I will upload the code to GitHub at some point, It still requires a few tweaks however at the moment.

Social Miner

Last year I worked as part of team of three where we created an entry for the Yahoo Dundee Hack Day 2012. The entry that we created managed to obtain 1st place.

The web application we created can be used to view and find emerging viral content posted by people you follow on Twitter. We also created it as a platform that would provide a very simple and efficient way to access and navigate this content. This allows you to stay on the website without having to leave to view content. I had the web application hosted on this website for a few months now but it required/requires some changes but I have decided to make it public now as I think it is a very neat little application that others might like to use. You can find out more information about it at http://taylore.net/?page_id=450 .

Access it here Social Miner

GitHub

Over the past few years I have been using Git for source control on my projects both personal and for university. I really enjoy using it and find it makes it much easier to manage larger projects and I think it would be useful if others can benefit from the code I have written as well.

My account is https://github.com/Stewart-Taylor

I’m also now hosting my Laser System on it, as people request the code for it frequently (Also feel free to use it in your own project no need to ask for permission).

3D Sailing Ship

For one of my graphics assignments I had to use make use of shaders So I looked up fragment and vertex shaders and managed to complete this scene in 5 days. A vertex shader is used to adjust the vertex heights for the ocean. A fragment shader was also used for the texturing, sparkle ad gradient effects and I made a simple overlay shader the attempts to make the scene look more vintage.