Hello there! My name is Dan Siegel and I'm a software developer, startup junkie and cult psychology nerd who dreams about using technology to shift people's minds for the greater good.
About Me
Work Experience
X Movement
A digital social experience designed to help School communities measure and build Positive School and Classroom Cultures. Using inquiry based learning, reward mechanisms and more, X Life is a behaviour encouragement tool meant to be used by entire school communities. Built using Composer, MySQL, and a proprietary front end engine. See it at xmovement.online.
Materialize/Voovo
The first startup I co-founded. A service where users can crowdsource quotes for the printing and shipping of 3D printed models. Through a simple process, users choose or upload a 3D printable model, and are able to select customizations such as a preferred material and colour. Unfortunately defunct – we were attracting high-end printers and low-end consumers.
Thumble
Think “Instagram meets Reddit” – a photosharing app that allows users to rate content. Users can upvote, downvote or “bump” other user’s photos. Because we needed fast traction, this project involved guerrilla marketing, which was a really fun experience. Built in Objective-C with Django (Python) and Redis on the backend.
The DMZ at Ryerson University
I was brought on board at the DMZ at Ryerson University to customize an interactive timeline built in Adobe Flash. The project involved building a website to house an application that was built using ActionScript 3.0.
Projects
Quality Poetry
I was speaking with a professional photographer friend of mine about her difficulties when it comes to captioning her pictures. We joked about captioning everything with bad poetry, and Quality Poetry was born out of that conversation. Quality Poetry, found at qualitypoetry.com, is a webapp that procedurally generates poems. The front end is written in PHP with jQuery and AJAX, and the API is written in NodeJS.
HowAmI
At X Movement, the development team had a daily check-in where we summed up how we were feeling in one word. To keep things interesting, I threw together a little angularJS app to help my team find more descriptive words. Later, it was built into an iOS app.
LotOLife
A tool that procedurally generates a fake human being using real-world statistics. Starting with gender and country of origin, the tool attempts to generate personal information, abilities, and more. The name comes from the fact that there’s a “Lot O’ Life”, and that the random selection of traits in life is kind of like playing the Lotto. Find Lotolife here.
Okay Pill
Okay pill is a clothing brand built around mental health awareness. As a friend of the founder, I volunteered to build their website per his designs. The website is built in NodeJS using React.
Unity Music Visualizer
A simple audio visualizer built for fun in Unity, with scripts written in C#. The program detects the beat of music and pulses lights accordingly. It was meant to be an early prototype of a more fleshed-out music visualizer.
Scal3d
An immersive, 3D visualization of the universe. Built in Unity and intended for use with an Oculus Rift, Scal3d is a sample of of useful, immersive and fun education technology. See a demonstration on the Scal3d website.
Crowdlet
An innovative wearable technology that enhances interactivity in live entertainment spaces using social media. It allows the user to control the colour of their wristband using twitter hashtags. Each hashtag corresponds to a specific colour, curated by the event’s coordinator. The bracelet was created using a web-enabled microcontroller, the Twitter API, an iOS app written in Objective-C, a 3D printed chassis and more.
Mashees
A fun tool that creates a mashup of gifs, audio and text. Content is driven by the users, so the amount of potential combinations is almost unlimited! Built in Node.js and React.