Tim Case is my name. Spree is my game.
Spree Projects
Currix Current 
Currix will be a site where educational videos can be bought and downloaded.
Recruit Military May 2011
Recruit Military wanted their site upgraded from Spree 0.11.0 to the current version at the time 0.50.2.
Novawhite April 2011
Novawhite hired a Russian programmer to build their Spree site and then brought me in to finish it after the project hit an incomplete indefinitely state.
Rise Clothing March 2011
Rise wanted a report in Excel Spreadsheet format of their completed orders, so that they could import them into quickbooks..
Thoughtful December 2010 - February 2011
Thoughtful is a unique Seattle startup which gathered data through Facebook to build a recommendation engine that would allow users to get gifts for their friends and family based on predicting things they would like. I helped them strictly with the Spree ecommerce parts of their site, and we customized Spree a bit to fit closer to what they were doing. Some of their products were emailed vouchers and some of them were actually shipped, so we had to make the checkout process change based on whether their were shippable products in the cart or not.
Always Jewelry November 2010
Always Jewelry is the online ecommerce site for a brick and mortar jewelry store in Philadelphia. Always Jewely's founder wanted a site similar to Gemvara. This site is notable because I configured faceted search using Solr search engine running on top of Spree.
Good Health Teas October 2010
Good Health Teas is a line of teas sold by chiropractors.
Conti USA August 2010
Conti is the USA distributor of fine dining products from Italy. Conti's design firm installed Spree and needed help with some of the more complex parts of Spree, and they brought me in as a more advanced developer to resolve any of the difficult questions or problems they were having with getting Spree to behave in exactly the way they wanted. Most of the work I did involved getting a connection with Fedex to correctly price out shipping rates.
Paradise Marketing Services July 2010
Paradise Marketing Services are one of the largest wholesale distributors of condoms and personal hygiene products in the United States. Paradise stated that doing business online was a new thing both for them and for their customers, and that the new site needed to be easy to use and non-intimidating. I focused my effort towards making Spree a customized tool for them that reduced the flexibility Spree provides as a general ecommerce solution to a more customized solution that is geared towards the way Paradise does business. Some of the highlights from this project include a robust addressing system that allows customers to manage their addresses similar to how it's done at amazon.com and pricing and terms system that allows Paradise to change the checkout process and pricing structure of the store depending on price structure and terms given to a specific customer.
Never Stop Pedalling June 2010
Never Stop Pedalling is an Australian retailer that specializes in fixed gear bicycling. Never Stop Pedalling launched their store on Spree. They gave me html templates for their store design and I converted them to be used with Spree.
Tease Underwear April 2010
Tease Underwear is a line of men's and women's fashion underwear that is made in Brazil and sold in the United States. I'm partners with my friends who are fashionistas, they make the underwear and I handle the online sales. As an owner of tease I created the online store to handle our sales to the US. We will be launching the store in the Fall of 2010, fulfillment will be handled by Amazon.com and I may be writing extensions to facilitate that process. My involvement with Tease is a big reason about why I like doing ecommerce, it's not something I program for other people, it's something I use myself too.
City Winery Merchandise Store December 2009
City Winery is a wine bar in Manhattan, I built two ecommerce sites for them one was with Spree. The Spree store is for selling physical merchadise such as wine, cheeses, and t-shirts. Spree was a good choice for this type of store because they needed customization that couldn't supported by a solution such as Shopify. Special business rules like not selling any alcohol products outside of New York state, or forcing next day shipment if a gift pack containing cheese needed to be coded into the checkout logic. I extended Spree through a site extension and was able to build a very specific checkout process that conformed to how City Winery wanted to run their online sales. This shows the power of having access to the source code.
Spree Contributions
New features and bug fixes to Spree core
I try to help out and contribute to Spree, recently I added bundler support in preparation for Rails 3.
Extensions
I didn't like the way Spree displayed variants as radio buttons, to me it looked awkward. I wanted to put the variants in dropdowns so I wrote an extension to do it.
Other Rails projects
Pernod Ricard USA August 2010
Pernod Ricard is one of the largest beverage companies in the world. I assisted their design team to customize a RubyonRails CMS site to fit exactly their needs.
City Winery Event Store January 2009
City Winery is a winery located in downtown Manhattan. The total amount of time for the initial City Winery rollout was an impressive 3 months. I wrote all of the backend code which probably comprised 80-90% of the whole solution. The winery in addition to being a restaurant also hosts live events with famous music acts such as Joan Osbourne, Calexico, and, Steve Earle. The City Winery site starts off as a simple CMS where staff can add new content for the site. The admin section allows them to also create two different types of events, General Admission and Seated Events which then appear on the site ready to have tickets sold to members and the general public. When a member elects to purchase a seated event they are taken to a special seat picker which contains a layout of the City Winery seating and allows the member to select the exacts seats they want. Memberships are sold through the site that give people special discounts at the winery. When a person buys a membership they receive a $35 credit towards wine classes and a $10 credit at the winery. A special accounting system was created to keep track of these credits and their usage at the winery. When a City Winery member visits the winery they are given a special card which is swiped during the evening for all of their consumption of wine at the premises. At the end of the night when the member checks out, City Winery's point of sale system, makes an Http call to the web site whereupon the site subtracts the credits from the total amount, charges a credit card on file, and then sends a SOAP call back to the winery with a success or failure status for the credit card charge. Credit card handling is with Authorize.net.
Gist July 2009
Gist started out as an experimental project at Vulcan Labs, headed ultimately by Paul Allen. When I began working on the project it was very fuzzy about what exactly the project would be. The idea of Gist was to glean important and relevant information by importing and analyzing emails. Initially, we analyzed who sent you emails and who you sent emails to, providing us with a way to generate a very rough social graph based on your email usage. From there we tried to find relevant news and blog items based on your contacts, so that you could be more informed about the people who you meet. Think google searching someone you know only having it be automatic and for all of the people in you inbox. When I first started working on Gist it was a very fuzzy project in terms of what exactly Gist would be. We spent a lot of time brainstorming and prototyping out ideas. I tried applying collective intelligence algorithms to see if we could find better information using a rough semblance of AI. The final conclusion I reached was that although the collective intelligence algorithms could produce some impressive results, I couldn't get them to produce 100% accuracy, and without that level of precision it was difficult to see how the application of them would be valuable. Close didn't cut it in this case. Still, we were able to generate enough of an idea that the initial skunk works project was rolled out into a separate startup company that continues today developing Gist as a startup.
Divvy September 2008
Divvy is a start up where the initial idea was to allow people to share and contract physical goods such as cars, bicycles, or lawn mowers from one another using a format more like Facebook and less like Craigslist. The idea was to establish a trust through personal relationships captured through friending other users. A system was designed so that a user could create a profile and then upload images and descriptions of items they might be interested in exchanging. Like most startups the initial idea wasn't very definitive and a lot of the development was built out in an exploratory manner, this is a situation where RubyonRails is a well-suited framework. As time went on, the product has launched and morphed into a different idea, most startups do this.
There's more projects, I haven't listed everything this was just a sampling.
Thanks for reading if your interested in hiring me feel free to email me at tim@powerupdev.com.