dk.

Hello
I'm Dan Kawalsky

Thanks for dropping by. Stay a while!

Full Stack and Cloud Engineer. (I design and make things for the web, in VR, and in the Cloud.)

About me

Since high school, I've been making apps of all sizes. When Android and iOS apps were all the rage, I made a homework prioritizing app, which amassed tens of thousands of downloads, teaching me a lesson or two about building for scale.

Then I went to college at USC, keen on becoming a biomedical engineer. I found that I could more readily engage with nature and technology by pursuing a Computer Science degree, so I went ahead and did that. I got to tinker with VR in the same Mixed Reality Lab where Oculus' inventor, himself, tinkered. I also started to think about computing for social good.

Now I work on IBM Cloud, building robust backend systems for high-impact services running in public and private cloud.

Experience

IBM Cloud
LA Times
SpaceX
USC ICT MxR Lab
USC Computer Science

Projects

2 / 12
â›ĩ Personal
Africa Green Tours

I met Claude in Kibuye, Rwanda, when he took me on a tour of Lake Kivu. He asked me to make him a website, so I made this, his Google Business listing, and his TripAdvisor listing. Each one is getting more popular every month!

TravelTourismAWS CloudfrontAWS Route53AWS S3
đŸŒŗ Personal
Carbon Footprint Dashboard

Your carbon footprint is calculable from your location history. How? Well, check out this repository and website and find out! Then, consider donating to an accredited carbon offset organization.

JavascriptHTMLOpen SourceData Viz
✅ IBM Cloud
Private DNS GLB Health Checking

The health check feature of IBM Cloud private DNS global load balancing is essential to ensuring the availability of your application infrastructure. The health check is a DNS solution, and it is highly configurable for whatever setup your private network demands. I made health checking (the microservices themselves) functional, available, and reliable.

IBM CloudPrivate DNSEnterpriseFull StackKubernetesMicroservices Architecture
☁ī¸ Personal
Kubernetes Questions (beta)

KubernetesQuestions.com aims to be a resource for beginners, including a Q&A feature and credits for course providers. KubernetesQuestions.com is rendered on the "server side" (in this case serverless lambdas) and served from AWS where it was built and deployed using the budding AWS CDK.

Full StackServerless ArchitectureServer-Side RenderingTypeScriptReactKoaAWS
📈 Personal
WatchCovid.org

Constantly updated dashboard aesthetically providing metrics of global COVID-19 case data across 3 categories.

ReactD3FirebaseMaterialUI
🚁 Personal
My 3D Space

An interactive, 3D space where a collection of my pursuits and interests live.

ThreeJSReactFirebase
📰 LA Times
Augmented Reality Web Article

The LA Times' (and perhaps world's) first AR news article. I built this with vanilla Javascript. The browser-based augmented reality leverages AR Core and ARKit and the interactive map is from Mapbox. The whole thing is cute. Check it out.

JavascriptARFlaskMapbox
đŸĻ„ GeoImpact
City Planning Engine

GeoImpact was a student startup that I built a prototype interactive city planning engine for. We pitched with this MVP and went to Phase II of the UChicago Polsky ANVC pitch competition.

QGISUnity
🧑đŸģ‍⚕ī¸ Freelance
Mountain Counseling Billable Hours Dashboard

Mountain Counseling offers personal and professional life counseling. This unironically light green-themed dashboard graphically portrays billable employee activities over time. It also has basic administrative functions for managers, such as the ability to create and modify employee contact and login info.

ReactChartJSAWSFreelanceHIPAA Compliant
🕹ī¸ USC Games
Olympus

Olympus is a virtual reality simulation game that takes place during the arrival of the first colonists on Mars. You scale and protect your colony until you can buy and build a self-sustaining water pump, without which Olympus will die of dehydration.

SteamVRHTC ViveUnity (C#)
đŸ”Ŧ USC Instite of Creative Technology
Picture-in-Picture Navigation

I developed an application (now in beta testing) that reduces optical flow to travel through virtual environments without the nauseating peripheral vection. My testing environments include procedurally generated forests, mazes, and outer space obstacle courses.

SteamVRHTC ViveUnity (C#)
🎛ī¸ USC Computer Science
Freestyle

Freestyle is a music-mixing experience that is inspired by wemakecoolsh.it's Madeon's Adventure Machine. It's buckets of fun.

FirebaseMusic

Still here?

Not that there's any rush for you to leave. If you'd like to contact me, reach me below.

Dan Kawalsky
contact@danielkawalsky.com