Callen Shaw
's Absolutely Splendid Little Homepage

Callen who?

Welcome to Callen Shaw's personal webpage! I have set up this section of omegagames.net (my website) to create a Digital Resume for myself. This site serves as a way for me to display the image I hope to project on potential employers, grad school committees, or others wishing to "size me up" as a person. While a paper resume(.docx) is still the preferred way of transmitting information, I hope to integrate aspects of my digital lifestyle into such an unexpressive process, and maybe even give a potential employer a few minutes of fun playing Clingo (a clone of the popular word game) or Rocket Mandate, a java-applet space defense game.

Contact Information

  • Name:
    • Callen Shaw (rhymes with "Alan")
  • Email:
  • Permanent Address:
    • 43 Lawn St.
    • Pittsburgh, PA 15213
  • Phone Number:
    • (814) 421-5522

Academia

I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in Computer Science on April 26, 2009 with a G.P.A. of 3.26

Recent Projects

    • QR-Code e-Scavenger Hunt
    • Spring 2009
    • This project was done as a directed study under Dr. Alexandros Labrinidis at Pitt. I worked with classmate Jesse Szwedko to develop a web-frontend for a tech-enabled scavenger hunt, and on our departmental "CS Day" the system was deployed so users were sent around to different vendors using printed QR Barcodes. Our research poster won the undergraduate poster competition at CS Day, and was also submitted in a paper to the MobiDE conference where it was chosen for demonstration in summer 2009.
    • Training Game AI with Neural Networks
    • Spring 2009
    • As a term project in Artificial Intelligence Application Development with Dr. John Aronis we were asked to develop an AI project where the only requirement was that it was "ambitious". I created a simple bumper car game with Microsoft XNA Game Studio, and wrote a Neural Network library in C# for it. The neural net was imprinted so that cars successfully performed basic offensive and defensive actions, and I wrote a research poster about the project for CS Day.
    • A Day Out: An Interactive Fiction
    • Spring 2009
    • This project was done for the course Narrative and Technology, a literature course concerned with narratives in alternate media like hypertext, video games, etc. For our term project we were asked to design a narrative in one of the media we studied, so (given my programming history) I chose to make a video game. The game is short and was rushed a bit, but the mechanics of it worked extremely well and could easily be expanded into a more polished game. The installation file can be downloaded here.

Employment

    • Student Computing Services Technician
    • University of Pittsburgh Computing Services and Systems Development
    • August 2007 to April 2009
    • Contact: Cristy Spino
    • Responsible for repairing computers, assisting network setup and troubleshooting, and installing software for students and faculty within the university. Also fielded calls from other technicians on appointments.
    • Application Developer
    • Applied Systems Associates
    • Summer 2007, Summer 2008
    • Contact: Scott Leib
    • Developed an internal application used within the company using VB.net and MSSQL database technology. The application tracks the progress of company code modules from development to deployment for clients. The initial version was finished in my first summer, and during my second I added features and fixed bugs that had been found over the year.
    • Application Developer
    • University of Pittsburgh Workstudy
    • September 2005 to April 2006
    • Contact: Dr. Jeremy Levy
    • Developed backend of Dr. Levy's research website, as well as fixing and maintaining an inventory database application used by his labs. I almost exclusively used MySQL and PHP for these projects.

Other Projects

    • Drinkards, Oh Snap! and Garrett the Slug
    • 2008-2009

    • I developed Oh Snap! with a few friends, who mostly provided graphics and sound. Garrett the Slug was a project I completed in four hours one night to test how quickly a "complete" game could be produced with C# and XNA Game Studio technologies.

      Drinkards was my most ambitious release to date, and also my most successful. It is a drinking game played in turns by up to 30 players, where every player draws a drink card on their turn. The cards get players to drink, but the Sobriety Test - a minigame where you touch your hands to your nose - makes sure they don't drink too much.

      All three are now available online through the XBLA Indie Games portal.

    • omegagames.net
    • 2006 to present
    • My personal website, which I haven't tended to much until recently. The home and forum have not been touched recently, but I just added the current games page to finally organize all my old and new games.

About Callen

I am now living at Lawn St. with four good friends, who all stand on the precipice between school and their professional lives. I no longer know which side of that line I'm on, but feel confident that I will find a rewarding position in either before too long. Otherwise I'll be programming more Xbox 360 games, sitting around the fire in the backyard, or trying one of my other hobbies like arts and crafts, amateur electrical work, or disc golf.