Contributions:
- When Prabhakar first joined, he redesigned the home page logo, the blackboard toolbar and the sidedrawer UI
- Prabhakar's favorite color is orange, and that has since been Explain's main highlight color.
- Back then, we noticed the importance of being able to upload an image or PDF to the background and annotate on top of it. Prabhakar had the idea to use 2 HTML canvas, a front canvas for displaying strokes and a back canvas for rendering the PDF, which keeps the code modular and easy to reason about.
- As Explain was started to be used for, the posts were disorganized and chaotic and unmanagable. "Untitled 1", "Untitled 2", "Untitled n". He implemented the ability to organize posts in folders and by date, which led to better organized content for 8.02 and for our internal knowledge base.
Contributions:
- Winston introduced audio chat, video chat, screenshare, rich-text editor, and others.
- Back then, videos would be fetched in its entirety. Every time we load 10 videos, that's about 1000 document reads. Winston instead take an image snapshot of the blackboard when its uploaded, and so we can use that image as the preview for the video without fetching the audio and the pen strokes.
- Winston started a lot of the infrastructure work for video and audio communications in the collaborative rooms, as well as the participants updating logic
- Tony helped stabilized features during an extremely stressful time - 1 week before Fall 2020. I never had to test the code he wrote - they simply worked, which made it so much easier for me to sleep. Features Tony fixed included voice chat, shuffle, announcement, mute all, etc.
- Jing Lin
- Hubert Wasilewski
- Lujing Cen
- John Lin
- Hong Qian Tan
Without Dr Dourmashkin, the Feynman project would never see the light of day. Back then, I told him that he should use Zoom because Explain is not great for real-time communications. Instead, he decided to screenshare his iPad and use Explain's blackboard. After 6 weeks, there were hundreds of visual animations in 8.01.
Since then, Dr Dourmashkin introduced other faculty members to explain.mit.edu, convinced Prof. Krishna to provide iPads to all students for Fall 2020, and persuaded his colleagues in 8.01 to collectively trust in using an experimental prototype for Fall 2020.
Special thanks to:
- Prof. Paola Rebusco
- Prof. Jason Ku
- Prof. Krishna Rajagopal
- Prof. Peter Fischer
- Prof. Gilbert Strang
- Prof. Bill Aulet
- Stephanie Yuen
- Kristen Surrao
- Deborah Wen
- Anuj Apte
Recent interviews!
- Isabel Salinas (student)
- Paige Dote (student)
- Matthew Leonard (grader)
- Pierre Barral (Graduate TA)
- Nicolas Romeo (Graduate TA)
- Nicole Shigiltchoff (student)
- Hung Huynh (student)
- Emily Crabb (Graduate TA)
- Julia Xia (student)
Organizations:
- Sandbox: for repeatedly funding someone like me with no clear plans and track record
- VMS
The internet:
- Even You for inventing Vue.js
- Google for launching Firebase and Firestore
- The Net Ninja: your "Fullstack Development with Vue Firestore" was the beginning of Explain
- Academind
Special inspirations:
- Pre-project: ExplainEverything, KhanAcademy, Quora, The Number Devil, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman
- (2017) Dr and vivid snow: a sight exists that can cure all diseases of the heart
- (2019) Charlie, Discord and Dota: there is something magical about open voice channels
- (2020) Joe and Closer: save the world, even if it's for selfish cause, even if kindness is mere hypocrisy, because if someone's life is better because of that, then that is more real than anything.
Other people who helped me and the project at some point:
- Samer (the best 18.06 actor in the world), Rionna, Yaseem, Bibek, Fadi, Kelvin, Michael, Taylor