Brad Pommen - Nelson Tech Club - Tech Village 24h Web Dev Contest

Team Leader and Hackerspace Coordinator of the Nelson Tech Club, Brad Pommen, led 2 high school and 2 college students on to win 2nd place in a local 24 hour web development contest. The team utilized strict HTML 5 coding practices, PHP on a Linux server and CSS validation to provide an elegant, feature-rich website for Gaia Services. Pitted against local professional businesses, this was an exciting win for the team and the growing Hackerspace, comprised of local technology enthusiasts.

“We didn’t use any existing templates or CMS systems to get started,” commented team Leader Brad Pommen “In the spirit of the competition we literally built the site from the ground up and coded it all by hand.”

Sean Melvin, owner of Gaia Janitorial Services was so please with the site he received from the competition that he doubled the second place team’s winnings out of his own pocket.

Client: Alberta Parks & Recreation, Writing On Stone Interpretive Center via Shamrock Hutterite Farming Colony, Bow Island, Alberta.

Process: Manual conversion of the static images to digital line art, importing the completed drawings into AutoCAD for scaling and tooling assignments, generation of CNC code to be machined by Shamrock Colony.

Final products were  scaled at approximately 24″ x 36″ in solid cedar timber.

Braille is a dying language. In 1960, 50% of legally blind, school-age children were able to read Braille in the U.S. According to the 2007 Annual Report from the American Printing House for the Blind, there are approximately 57,696 legally blind children in the U.S. Out of those school-age children, only 10% use Braille as their primary reading medium. I took it upon myself to learn the basic grade 1 alphabet and a few conjunctions to help myself recognize Braille in my daily life. Also, after watching, “The Book of Eli“, I figured I could do my part to save a little bit of humanity.

: )

Sign scaled to 48″ wide, machined out of 3/4″ MDF.