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SUM is a recent addition to CUNY portfolio of websites. It was born out of idea to create a place which would elevate and aggregate the scientific research. The project was materialized by the Office of Communications and Marketing at The Graduate Center. It was led by a small group of professionals which included a graphic designer, staff writers, project manager and me. My role was to provide a technical backbone to the group. I was responsible for development, testing, deployment, and later maintenance of the site. Since the time window was very limited, a lot of the solutions were taken off the shelf and properly integrated. SUM is based on WordPress technology, heavy customized with changes to the dashboard itself. I am very fond of this site since I was the person who moved the files to the hosting server and thus brought it to life.
Unlike bigger companies which very often base their infrastructure on solutions offered by external software vendors, at Gotham many products are build in-house. For me, this was a great opportunity to learn and explore innerworkings of many interrelated sub-systems. The site not only possesses its own content management system but also has an online learning platform and intranet web application used for managing everyday business operations, of course, all internally developed. My role was to improve instructor evaluation module that was taking feedback from students and crunch some statistical output. In addition, since the codebase was developed over a span of more than a decade, I was helping to migrate code into more modern framework. I would like to thank Charlie Shehadi, Director of Technology at Gotham, a man who wrote thousands of code lines and helped me better understand the modern web and challenges associated with it.
I have the privilege to be one of the global administrators for the site. The Graduate Center is a Ph.D. granting institution within New York public university system. Aside from day to day work on the site, I was responsible for building several landing pages for various academic programs and integrating them with proprietary content management system. The data from the prospective students was visually summarized and then used both by the Admissions Office to track the enrolment level and the Office of Communications and Marketing to evaluate advertising strategy.