Six engagements worth describing in detail. In most of them the website was the reporting layer on a system that did the real work.
Arctic Mars Analogue Svalbard Expedition
Carnegie Institution of Washington · NASA-funded · 2006
AMASE sent a science team to Svalbard to test Mars-mission instruments and protocols in an Arctic analogue environment. They needed a way for the field team to record what they found, move it out, and let the public follow along — from a site with a satellite link measured in kilobits.
Hunor Networking was engaged directly, without a competitive bid, on the strength of prior delivery for the institution. The statement of work ran to three phases:
- Feasibility. Streaming audio and video from the site, secure high-volume data transmission, and an expedition-site condition webcam. Server and network requirements specified to, and security requirements reviewed with, the Carnegie IT department.
- Build. Database entities and relations, SQL scripts and testing, forms and reporting, object-oriented PHP for the interactive layer, and the visual identity for the expedition.
- Handover. Testing, documentation and transfer of the software to the Carnegie IT department.
The core constraint shaped everything: individual data entities up to 250 MB had to move reliably between team members, while a field worker logging a sample — name, description, GPS coordinates, analysis result — had a few kilobits per second to do it in. The sample log and the bulk transport were therefore separate paths, with the interactive web interface sitting on the thin one.
Astrobiology research database
Carnegie Institution of Washington, Geophysical Laboratory
A normalised relational database covering the institution’s astrobiology programme: documents held locally or referenced remotely, fellowships and their descriptions, people, and the links between them. Each table carried its own comments and ownership references, so a record could always be traced back to the person who entered it.
The database ran on the institution’s own infrastructure. The web interface was the reporting and data-entry layer on top of it, not the system of record — which is why the schema is still legible today.
Patent and Trademark Office Society
PTOS, the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, and IPjobs
A professional society with a peer-reviewed journal, a membership, committees, an annual calendar, and an intellectual-property job board — governed by volunteer officers who rotate out every couple of years.
Hunor Networking carried the journal’s publishing workflow, the society’s public presence, advertising and subscription handling, and the domains and hosting beneath all of it, across three decades of changing boards. The recurring problem in this kind of work is never technical: it is that nobody remembers why something was set up the way it was. Continuity of the engineer is the deliverable.
Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Server build-out plus the databases behind the AAAS DoSER programme: affiliate and network organisations with their RSVP and questionnaire records, seminar registration and attendance breakdowns, speaker rosters, advisory committee records, staff and consultant directories, and the mailing infrastructure that drove the programme’s outreach.
This is the engagement most often mistaken for web design. Almost none of it was.
Touring production sites
Columbia Artists Management Inc.
Public sites for touring productions, including streaming media, fan registration, bulletin boards and feedback handling — built and hosted at a point when delivering audio and video over the web was still an open engineering question rather than a solved one.
A diaspora’s digital record
Hungarian-American cultural institutions · ongoing
A federated network of museum, association, journal and archive systems serving Hungarian-American institutions and their partners abroad. The largest component is a community bulletin board that has been running since 1993, whose archive had to be reconstructed from dead static pages, orphaned mailing-list exports and personal mail archives, then normalised into a single searchable, categorised corpus with its images recovered and re-linked.
This is the practice where machine-assisted processing has changed what is possible. Work that would once have been quoted as several person-years of manual transcription and cataloguing is now tractable for a small institution’s budget.
Built on the client’s own infrastructure
The engagements below never touched a server of ours, and none of them appears in a list of domains we manage — the institution held the domain, and in several cases we specified and built the machine the system ran on. They were also, by value, the larger half of the practice.
American Association for the Advancement of Science
A server specified, built and installed at the client, carrying the systems behind the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion: conference and seminar scheduling, registration and payment handling, reservations, and the relational databases underneath — affiliate and network organisations with their RSVP and questionnaire records, seminar attendance breakdowns, speaker rosters, advisory committee records, and staff and consultant directories.
This is the engagement most often mistaken for web design. Almost none of it was.
Carnegie Institution of Washington
A standing relationship across the Geophysical Laboratory rather than a single project. Research group sites and the databases behind them, hosted on the institution’s own machines, including personal research and publication sites for senior scientists. Work for the NASA Astrobiology Institute ran through the same relationship, alongside the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group and the Arctic expedition software described above.
The 2006 expedition contract records why the work kept coming back: prior projects delivered cost-effectively and to high quality under significant time constraints, which is why that one was awarded without a bid.
Columbia Artists Management
Production sites for touring shows, with streaming audio and video, fan registration, galleries and bulletin boards — built and operated when delivering media over the web was still an open engineering question. The relationship came through a director at the agency who was already a client of ours in another business, which is how most work of this kind arrives.
Calvert Internal Medicine
One of the larger physician practices in Calvert County, Maryland.
We built the practice’s encrypted communications and the mail infrastructure carrying them, together with certificate management — at a point when secure messaging was rare in a practice of that size, and the compliance expectations around patient information were tightening sharply.
Medical work is unlike most commercial web engagements, and the differences are the whole job:
- Mail has to be provably secure, not merely encrypted in transit when the receiving server happens to support it.
- Certificates cannot quietly lapse. An expired certificate on a practice’s mail path is not a cosmetic failure; it interrupts clinical correspondence.
- Records carry retention obligations measured in years, which means the system has to remain readable long after the people who commissioned it have moved on.
- The practice holds the liability. That makes a vendor sitting in the middle of patient data a risk rather than a convenience — and it is why we build systems the client owns outright.
It is the clearest illustration of what this firm is for. A practice cannot treat its systems as a marketing expense, cannot afford a vendor who stops returning calls, and needs the engineer who designed the thing to still be reachable years later.