Arleigh Dickerson

TeleTapper EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR) is a modality of psychotherapy which was developed for the treatment of PTSD.

A key component of EMDR therapy is bilateral stimulation (BLS), where stimuli are applied to alternating sides of the body. BLS is often provided in office settings via the use of two handheld devices (tappers) that vibrate in an alternating fashion.

Teletapper is a web application that provides BLS for EMDR teletherapy through the use of video game controllers.

WebRTC Burner

After Covid forced us all to work from home, I was amazed at the sheer number of videoconferencing products on the market. I wondered how hard it would actually be to write a simple app that does two-way camera and audio streaming between two browsers. It turns out it's not that difficult because WebRTC already solves most of the hard parts. I found WebRTC interesting because once a connection between two clients is established the clients talk to each other directly instead of using the server as a middleman.

This repo contains a simple WebRTC client and brokering server I wrote using React, NextJS, MobX, and PeerJS. The reason I chose NextJS was because I could run the PeerJS brokering service from within Next's server code via express middleware. This means you would only have to deploy one node program to serve the client webpage and run the brokering server.

You can see an example of this code in action here.

Y2Redux - HHVM Boilerplate for Yii2

HHVM is a virtual machine used to execute programs written in Hack or PHP. During my time at the AEA we floated the idea of running our existing codebase on HHVM for better scalability. I created this project as a way to see if our code would tolerate being executed on HHVM. Unfortunately it was discovered that HHVM was not compatible with the older parts of our codebase. After the project was abandoned at work I repurposed it as a container to host my personal website.

AEAWeb Overhaul

While working at the American Economic Association my team was tasked with adding a content management system to their existing website. We ended up implementing our own solution because we could not find anything off the shelf that satisfied our design requirements.

Features I worked on include:

• an initial proof-of-concept for management buy-in
• a revision control system to track content changes
• a database schema to store the changes in
• an internal portal for editing content and user administration
• role-based access control for users of the internal portal
• a caching system for frontend content