I'm Brian Cottingham. I recently graduated from N.C. State University with a degree in Computer Science. I now work at Contactology in Durham, NC as a PHP programmer.
I'm a fan of open source stuff. I like programming in Python, and have used Linux as my desktop OS since before Ubuntu was a gleam in Shuttleworth's eye. I even spent three years as the president/vice president of the NCSU Linux Users Group!
When I'm not programming I do karate and partake in a variety of genres of music and video entertainment.
My projects are hosted on GitHub, but here are the highlights of what I've worked on in my personal time.
MobileBlur is a mobile-friendly web-based interface for the online RSS reader NewsBlur. It provides a typical RSS reading experience, and gets it's data by regurgitating Newsblur's API.
MobileBlur has a few public users besides myself, and is my most recent effort to work on best practices for deployment, including a proper branching policy and automated deployment scripts.
spiffybot is my IRC bot. Like most IRC bots, he doesn't do much of anything useful; he's really just a programming playground for me.
IRC bots involve solving a surprising number of fun problems- networking, plugins, statefulness and statelessness on several levels, consumption of various web APIs, and more.
spiffybot hasn't gotten a lot of love lately, but I have plans to rewrite him to better solve some of the design flaws I've discovered, and to reflect the last couple years' improvement to my programming abilities
spiffyscore was my project for MUS 498, Independent Study in Computer Music. It's a program that helps me write music. I feed it sets of notes and rules about how the sets are allowed to follow each other and spiffyscore strings the sets together and passes them to fluidsynth for synthesis.
This project involved writing a basic compiler and context-free grammar generator. Pretty technical for a music scoring program.