Development

I’ve been doing Internet development for a lot of years now – just over 20. During that time, I’ve worked on everything from simple landing pages to sprawling sites with included mini-sites, to strict B2B and B2C Internet applications. Most of the code I’ve worked on over the past eight years or so has been for my employer at the time so I don’t have a lot of GitHub repos as that code is proprietary, but I’m trying to carve out more time to do personal work so my GH account will hopefully fill up quickly!

Below are some case studies of the more fun and exciting sites I’ve worked on, my contributions to those sites, and the technologies I used. Please note that I didn’t do the designs on all of the sites below, though through the development process I do get the chance to put my two cents in on the aesthetics for every site I develop – which is where my design background comes in handy! I also drive both the front-end and back-end user experience, which is great because UX and UI are things about which I have strong feelings, both for the people running and using the sites I develop and design.

I’ve had the opportunity to develop in a variety of environments including Mac, Windows, and Unix operating systems using everything from Dreamweaver to VIM, svn to git with GitHub and BitBucket, home grown PHP frameworks, YII, and WordPress – I can honestly say I’ve not been bored in many years!

Morvil Advertising + Design Group

Morvil Advertising + Design Group

The site of the advertising firm where I worked, this one was a lot of fun. There’s custom functionality galore, responsive CSS challenges everywhere, and I got to coach a junior developer through his first site contributions. Add all that to an original and exciting design, this one will probably never be truly finished – we’re still adding new functionality and content areas all the time.

The ‘m’ at the top, for instance, is custom navigation of client case studies – each study can be manually assigned an area of the grid in the back-end, and can be moved from group to group of studies as desired. When clicked, a drawer extends with custom coded side-to-side draggable track that takes the viewer through the full seamless case study.

main contributions:

  • Custom case studies with unlimited width image and dynamically constrained side-scrolling
    • Video playback at client definable areas in the case study
    • Client definable hover animations per case study
    • Client definable 'm' navigation tile with client definable positions
    • Case study grouping with user navigation
    • Responsive display from large desktop to phone display using the same datasets
  • Custom team member tracking and presentation
  • Full project ajax-driven tracking and display
    • Grouped and filtered by client-controlled industries and medium
    • Custom JavaScript routing and history stack manipulation
    • Multi-image lightboxed carousel functionality

technology used:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • HTML
  • Less
Geodynamics Group

Geodynamics Group

A responsive redesign of an existing site, this one afforded the chance to add some neat functionality for the client’s users as well as the clients themselves. Used to a WordPress set up where they would enter HTML directly into the text editor, I refactored the entire site to make use of custom post types and avoid the need for any client coding, giving them a more understandable and coherent back-end. I also refactored what was a static projects section into a dynamic, data-driven, categorized projects section with dynamic links to the services, areas, partners, and clients associated with each project. All under the control of the client. This was also another chance to work with a couple junior developers in the firm, helping to further their knowledge of CSS, JavaScript, and Twig technologies.

main contributions:

  • Custom service area tracking
    • Custom descriptions and display of each service offering
    • Client-controlled associated service image galleries
  • Custom projects tracking and display
    • Responsive display of all products grouped by service area
    • Accordion service project groups display
    • Single projects associated with multiple service area, displaying the proper service area when selected from the list
    • Client-controlled additional project information including client, location, service area, and project partners
  • Team member tracking and responsive display
  • Custom gallery functionality and display output per project, service area, and site-wide

technology used:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • Less
  • HTML
  • Twig
  • Timber
  • WordPress
  • gulp
  • babel
  • browserify
FlyILM

FlyILM

A site the firm I work at was hired to redesign, I got to add and revamp some functionality while implementing a new skin on the existing site. From migrating the flight tracking system from ColdFusion to PHP to a new CSS layout for the gallery to creating new templates for specific pages, this one ran the gamut of front and back end refactoring.

main contributions:

  • Port existing ColdFusion integration with third-party flight tracker software to PHP
  • Reskin entire site to new, fully-responsive design including creation of new and alteration of existing template files
  • Refactor most of the existing code, consolidating code base where necessary and possible

technology used:

  • HTML
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • jQuery
  • JavaScript
  • WordPress