Daniel McLaughlin’s Portfolio

I like building interesting things using computers. Here’s a selection of stuff I’ve made at work and elsewhere:

• Magic Lantern

  I’ve worked on many projects where it would have been neat to let users tweet a customized image. Twitter doesn’t make that easy to do, so I built Magic Lantern, a tool that handles the twitter integration and lets you share images with just a few lines of JavaScript.

• How much does your vote count?

  This piece for Fusion.net analyzed how differences in turnout and the quirks of the electoral college affect the leverage different groups have in presidential elections. We presented conclusions at the national level, and let readers explore the data through an interactive element.

• How presidential campaigns are building the perfect website

  By scraping the JavaScript powering the A/B tests on various candidates’ websites, I was able to reconstruct the experiments and tell a story about the ways that campaigns were tailoring their pitches. Campaign tech coverage tends to be access-driven, but gathering this unique dataset allowed us to pull back the curtain ourselves.

• Mobile Synthetic Sundial

  Using geolocation and device orientation data, this web app turns your phone into a sundial by simulating the shadow that a gnomon would cast on the screen.

  Code on GitHub

• hancock.lighting

  There’s a building in Boston whose lighted spire forms a sort of weather forecast. My friend Eric and I recreated it using responsive SVGs. The page reflects current weather conditions, but try clicking a line in the poem.

  Code on GitHub

• structure.exposed

  If you want to see what a website looks like without any CSS applied, this proxy can show you. It injects a script that removes stylesheets and inline styles, and uses a MutationObserver to prevent any from being added.

  Code on GitHub

• A nation changed: Globe coverage of the Kennedy assassination

  As part of the Boston Globe’s fiftieth anniversary coverage, I built this tool for revisiting the original reporting. It pairs facsimile pages with readable text, and works as well on mobile as it does on desktop browsers.

• 61Fresh

  61Fresh was a Twitter-powered Boston news aggregator. I built a system that followed hundreds of thousands of Boston tweeters, and this was one of the public-facing results, highlighting the local stories that were being shared most at the moment.

  Code on GitHub

• JFK Wizard

  There’s a station in Boston’s subway where an inbound train can appear at one of two platforms, but the track isn’t announced until the last moment. This web app uses the subway’s API to make a prediction with much more lead time, making your commute just a little less stressful.

  Code on GitHub

• Twitter Bingo

  Twitter bingo is a tool for making scavenger-hunt bingo games playable entirely through Twitter. Players tweet at a bot to get a card, then tweet photos with a hashtag to claim squares.

  Code on GitHub

• Hmpgr

  At SND Makes Boston, my team prototyped this tool for editing a homepage via direct manipulation. In this demo, you can drag articles around the page, slot new stories, and even edit headlines.

  Code on GitHub

• New York Rising

  This interactive museum exhibit for the New-York Historical Society uses augmented reality and hypertext to connect objects and tell the stories of New York during and after the Revolutionary War.

Thanks for taking a look! If you’d like to see more, check out my GitHub or say hi on Twitter.