Cello Expressions
Cello Expressions has existed in its current form for nearly six years. After briefly serving as the website for my high school cello quartet, it has been the home of my various digital projects for most of its existence. As this site and its content reach a level of relative digital maturity, it’s time to update the status if its…
The capstone project for my Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering (Building Science) was a semester-long team project to design a mixed-use development featuring mass timber. Our project was formulated around the 2015-2016 Timber in the City competition, which prescribed a mid-rise development at a New York City site (that will actually house the Essex Crossing development). The program included…
As a student at USC, I worked at the Annenberg Digital Lounge for the first two and half years of its existence. Coinciding with the opening of Wallis Annenberg Hall in 2014, I served as a WordPress expert in the development of training programs for students and the organization’s online presence. In addition to master-planning online content strategy and building the current iteration of the website, I authored a number of WordPress tutorials. These are primarily aimed at communications and journalism students; however, many are more-broadly useful for newer WordPress users. Check out my tutorials here.
For the final individual project in my undergraduate Building Science studio program at USC, I designed a mixed-use building on a constrained site in Los Angeles. The program includes twelve studio and one-bedroom residential units, parking, and a small retail/commercial space. The project meets the zoning requirements for the actual site and considers the context of the surrounding neighborhood. Project…
I worked at the USC Annenberg Digital Lounge from 2014 – 2016 as a resident WordPress expert. In addition to written tutorials, I created several video tutorials and workshops to help communications & journalism students create WordPress websites. These are tailored to students and paired with the in-person helpdesk available at the (physical) Digital Lounge. Here are a few selections:
These videos cover specific tasks and troubleshooting that come up for lots of students.
These videos serve as complete workshops for students to follow along with when setting up a site.
I also built the website for the digital lounge: AnnenbergDL.org. It hosts numerous resources similar to the tutorials above across a range of design software, authored by staff experts. The author and tool pages showcase the power of WordPress taxonomies. And there is even a (mostly hidden) course registration and management system that could eventually become available as a WordPress plugin. The Digital Lounge team will continue to build out this library of resources for USC students and the general public.
As I complete my three-year period involved in the leadership of USC ASCE, I want to add an archival link here to the content I created for its blog. I built the site from scratch my freshman year and it’s been going strong with the Twenty Fourteen theme for three years now. I wrote well over 100 posts on the blog over the past 3 years, easily my largest collection of work to date:
I’m launching another new site on celloexpressions.com this summer. Cello Expressions Photography could be considered a photo blog in many ways, but its primary purpose is to serve as a collection of visually stimulating and contextually significant imagery. Bringing my academic/professional interests to Cello Expressions for the first time, this site focuses on architecture, landscape architecture, and construction. Given my current internship at the USC Village project, expect a particular construction emphasis right now. Visually interesting textures and natural landscapes are also featured.
Check it out at https://celloexpressions.com/photography.
The site is using my Arbutus WordPress theme, resulting in a major focus on images and minimal UI. The theme will be publicly available soon, likely as a premium theme but possibly for free on WordPress.org depending on time. Note that due to the heavy use of images, it may take some time for the content to load, but once it does, it’s pretty cool!
I’m working at the USC Village jobsite this summer as an intern for Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Co. This is a huge project – 15 acre site, 6 buildings, over 1 million square feet – and USC has set up the usual webcams to monitor the construction progress. Unfortunately, theirs uses painfully outdated software that won’t even work in IE in…
I just published two plugins I developed for projects this semester on WordPress.org. Chromeless Widgets Page offers a quick way to build and iterate on a custom page that’s external to the web portion of a site. I developed it for the USC Annenberg Digital Lounge (where I’m the WordPress Specialist), where we used it to build an events page that’s…
For the second year, I was a part of USC ASCE‘s Concrete Canoe Team. We had a great year, placing 6th overall in our competition a year after placing 14th. The Concrete Canoe competition is one of the biggest competitions for civil engineering students in the country, with hundreds of schools participating each year. USC is in the Pacific Southwest Conference, which has 18 universities that bring over 1,000 students each year.