Some of the projects I’ve done recently on Elance. For a complete list see my profile page at balazsgodeny.elance.com.

Engineering Text Editor

The task was to create an editor for the IBIS (I/O Buffer Information Specification) language which is a standard for electronic behavioral specifications of integrated circuit input/output analog characteristics.

Some features of the editor:

• syntax highlighting
• graphical tree representation of the document structure, to ease navigation in large documents
• syntax checking
• graphing the data
• the usual text editor features: load, save,copy, paste, undo, redo, search and replace, etc.

Customer says: “Excellent service and would highly recommend to others. Provider was able to understand complex concepts and turn into working application. Went above and beyond in providing feedback and support for application development. Will use this provider again in the future.”

Bulk Photo Editor Tool

This is one of the tools I’ve made for a customer who needs to apply the same set of image processing operations to many photos. This tool lets the user open a photo, remove the background from the image and insert the remaining figure into one of a given set of background images.

Customer says: “Excellent provider - he did a script and GUI for me to improve the efficiency of cropping, resizing and pasting photos. Used some existing free libraries to make the work quicker/more efficient. Would 100% hire again. Also speaks perfect English, which made understanding very easy.”

Decision Support Algorithm

The task was the implementation of the Regime algorithm which is a state of the art tool in the field of qualitative multiple criteria choice analysis, used primarily in decision support systems. Implementing the algorithm required heavy mathematical artillery, still it had to be done without relying on special mathematical libraries. I’ve done it in Java and it was ported to Javascript later. It can be seen working live at www.comparewise.org.

Customer says: “This was our 2nd project working with Balazs - again he was very professional with excellent communication skills and actually delivered early! We will happily work with him again and recommend his services.”

Image Effects

Another image processing application. My customer needed a tool that places a number of reflecting bubbles on a photo. Several parameters of the effect is customisable, the end result is a very nice image where the bubbles seem to fly around in the image’s 3D space. Note how the bubbles are reflected in each other, this is not a trivial thing to achieve without doing ray tracing or any other 3D magic.

Customer says: “A thoroughly professional service from start to finish. Totally honest assessment of project and excellent quality work delivered within agreed timescale. 100% recommended.”

Real Time Signal Processing

This project was about analysing a musical signal using the Fast Fourier Transform. Several aspects of the signal has to be determined as fast as possible and display the result on screen real time. This was a proof of concept project, more focused on research than on application creation. Based on the success of this experiment the project will evolve into a full blown signal processing application in the near future.

Customer says: “Extremely professional and competent elancer. Went beyond the call of duty, and was a pleasure to work with, will definately be using again. Excellent core java skills and English communication skills, and constantly kept me updated with progress and new releases etc. Couldn''t have asked for any more, definately exceeded my expectataions. Altogether a pleasure to do business with.”

Firefighting Simulator Application

My customer needed a tool which simulates the operations of a firefighter company. Based on statistical data (like distribution of fire incidents within a city) the tool creates a set of simulated fire events and by following the rules and processes of real life fire fighting engines dealing with these incidents it gathers statistical data about the behaviour of the system (like average response time of firefighting trucks, time we need to put the fires off, etc). The generated data is used for expert decisions: where to put the fire stations in the city, how many trucks and ladders to send to each kind of fire alarms, in short: how to change the policies of the firefighters so that the level of their service can be improved while lowering the costs.

The application is roughly based on a system which was done thirty years ago in Fortran and which is used in many places in the US, but our version improves it in several ways: it allows much more flexibility in describing the operations of firefighters and it also provides a graphical display of the system’s behaviour in real time.

Customer says: “I was incredibly impressed with the quality of work and professionalism provided by Balazs on this project. I had posted this project with low expectations because of the complexity of the project and the background knowledge necessary to understand how fire service deployments work. Balazs was able to read through some background materials and quickly became a quasi-expert on the subject. We were able to have some very high level email conversations about about modeling fire department deployment. Balazs was committed to making sure the final product was a success. The delivered simulation had all the agreed-upon functionality (and more) and was incredibly well commented. I was very happy with all aspects of this project and look forward to working with Balazs again in the future.”

... and much more

One of the biggest advantages of freelancing compared to regular jobs is the wide range of subjects one meets. Some further examples of things I did:

• Chess tournament organizer software
• Research studies on the feasibility of implementing certain image compression algorithms on a mobile device
• Tool used in financial research
• Speeding up an existing solution that finds shortest distance of concepts in Wikipedia
• Good old video games like Space Invaders
• Animation effects
• Java API for a payment gateway