James Fator

Custom photo & video back up app for iOS

10 February 2015

Dropbox does smart phone camera back ups correctly. Take a picture one minute and it's in a folder on your computer the next minute. I know... it may not sound like a big deal, but it means a lot to me. I spend more time than I probably should in Photoshop and to be able to have images I took earlier already downloaded and ready to be opened is just a nice convenience.

About a month ago most of my free promotional Dropbox space recently expired and I ended up migrating over to Google Drive for my cloud storage needs where to my surprise, there was more free space than I expected! Google Drive has an automatic photo and video back up as well, so I thought everything was perfect, until I realized the back up feature wasn't in the Google Drive app, but the Google+ app. I 'm not trying to say anything bad about Google or Google+ at all, but I needed to get my back up features... back...

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App that tells me who's on the wifi

09 January 2015

I built an app which would tell me who's home based on whether their personal devices would respond to arp-scan requests on the wifi.

UPDATE 08/09/2020: I now know this would be a lot easier with custom software on the router. It's also creepy, so this will never get any more attention.

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Sending Mass Texts using Applescript

09 December 2014

Here's a quick way to send a batch message to multiple people quickly. The following is an Applescript which will send a custom message to a list of phone numbers.

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This is not an advertisement for Parse

29 November 2014

There's this service Parse which I've been meaning to try out for a while now, but haven't gotten to it until recently.

Even going into the project, I wasn't aware of just how awesome Parse is. As someone who has been and currently is developing backend systems for a startup company, if we had to do it all again, Parse looks very appealing. From my experience so far, I'll just be talking about the Parse Core, which is a bunch of services and features that significantly reduce the effort and time it would take to spin up and maintain servers. This means you can create databases, APIs, background jobs, etc. with ease.

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Ranking the best Vine videos

30 October 2014

There's this app called Vine that allows you to share videos that are up to 6 seconds in length. You can post your own "Vines" and even like, comment, and share Vines submitted by other users. The app has a Popular Page which allows you to see top Vines within a certain time period, but to my knowledge, there's no way to see the top Vines of all time. Once I realized there's a Vine API, I took matters into my own hands...

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2014 Greylock Hackfest

22 August 2014

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A summer at Facebook

22 August 2014

A picture with the man behind it all.

This summer I was blessed with an internship at Facebook in California as a Production Engineer. In all honesty, my expectations were blown out of the water; Facebook is so much more than I originally expected it to be and I couldn't get enough. From their internal tools to their long term goals, it really was a company that I was proud to work for and I found myself rooting for the products that we put out.

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Facebook friend request with sound?

22 August 2014

This summer I worked closely with 3 brilliant engineers to create an app that transmits data using high pitched sounds. We converted each number of your Facebook profile ID to a specific frequency. The receiving device would decode the audio and send you a friend request. It was an awesome experiment in alternative ways to add Facebook friends and it really brought me out of my comfort zone into the realm of audio encoding/decoding.

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