If your company is looking for a web/application developer like me, I’m available for full-time work and would love to talk to you.
I’ve worked for several local companies and in a wide range of CMS and systems, and think I could help boost your business and make things easier and better for you.
Give me a call or email so we can talk through how I can help you reach your goals.
I built the first iteration of this website back in 2011, from a design by Alex.
It was elaborate, interesting, and fun. I enjoyed it. But it was so complicated that we never actually finished it. I ran out of time as was working full-time and Alex began putting his work on Behance and Dribble, so our personal combined portfolio fell to last place in priority.
In 2023 I felt like it was time for a revamp as I anticipated increasing my workflow in the next year. We could, of course, have simply used and tweaked a theme and it would have functioned fine, but I wanted something a little different. I wanted to make our portfolio without the stack of ‘must haves’ that I would usually just assume should be built into a website…logo on top left, naviation on top right, call to action and contact button in hero position, things like that.
Instead, in thinking through what we actually needed, and what people coming to this website would be looking for, I realized that the branding of the website (logo, name, contact information, social) isn’t important in this case. The actual useful branding is the people, myself and Alex, since those who come here would generally be looking for either Alex’s portfolio or my own. So I removed the header and put a minimal amount of branding at the bottom of the page where people would be going to send a message (ideally). When you land on the website, depending on the link you’ve been given, you will see either Alex’s or my own information right away with no additional branding. I felt like a bit of a rebel removing the header, heh.
We settled on a single-page design with a large custom masonry grid showcasing the best of Alex’s work (not all, but his most impressive and interesting projects) and, since my work is not always visual, I chose to go with a blog format and bypass any sort of image gallery.
Alex’s grid items would link to a project that would include more traditional branding elements, but also, not a lot of obvious navigation. To allow people to move around to other projects they might be interested in, I built a carousel to function as the ‘related posts’ but hid it (revealing it briefly on page load) just under the header so as not to detract from the actual contents of the project. Alex can choose what projects to include in every case so he can guide a visitor’s path as they skip around through his work.
The layout of the project itself is basic, with an area at the top for mock (or real) products, such as an image of a hat or t-shirt with the logo in use on it, and then spaces for images and text below.
My blog has a nifty little design, hides some of the data behind a hover effect of the image, and uses mock code as decoration.
The front page being white in Alex’s design portion and black in my coding section was intentional and went well with the overall idea of design and development working in successful tandem to make useful and beautiful things.
In general, the direction I was going with this website and the overall idea was to toss out preconceived ideas and think about how to make the actual value and content of the website (from the visitor’s perspective) more readily available.
I built several custom modules for the Divi builder as part of this project and made them public on Git Hub..creating something useful to share with others online while also building what I needed for this website and adding to my recent work samples. Divi, by Elegant Themes, has been my favorite WordPress base template for quite a while and I extend and develop with it often.
While writing this post I was challenged by how to illustrate it. I want to generate a fun little AI image for each post but everything I tried for this one, just didn’t match. I needed something a little odd, very useful, and beautiful in its simplicity. I asked several people while I was out and about for their thoughts, hoping to jog an idea. Finally, a couple at my son’s sporting event mentioned a screwdriver and out of that came…the Allen Key. It’s perfect!
Intro
2010 – Starting Out and Freelancing
In 2010, after returning to the US from abroad, I built a web portfolio and put my resume online. I did a few small jobs, all in static html/css
2011 – Internship, my First Agency, and more Freelancing
I started working with agencies when a local agency, Wild Web Studios, agreed to take me on as an ‘intern.’ I put everything I had at the time into these and was very proud. They would take my hardcoded pages and bake them in to their custom CMS.
I did a few on-the-side projects like these.
After working for WWS awhile and doing a few of my own projects, I needed to find something more established. FDI Creative was where I ended up, part-time at first and then full-time. They worked mostly in Joomla at the time, so I got into building custom templates in Joomla, doing customer support, and hosting support among other things. I went from junior to lead dev in the time I was there and even got my first taste of mentoring other devs when more junior developers were brought on board.
Wanting to progress further professionally, I moved to a print company that was looking to start their own web department. They had room for growth and were willing to give me a lot of flexibility, so I was began work for CME Printing. I spent about a year and half there working in Magento, integrations and marketing…again all very good experiences.
2014 – Purposefully Purposeful, a Larger Agency
The larger design and marketing agency Savage was an exciting step for me. I remember wanting very much to jump up and down when I got the offer but I just smiled really big. Their web work was almost exclusively in WordPress building custom themes out of their, very nice and well thought out, designs. I experienced more in terms of planning and research and marketing strategy while there, and also deep dived into WordPress custom development, resuable blocks, and building themes. A small personal accomplishment while there was that I built the ‘Perculator.’ It was a base template with a solid grid and all of the typical elements and options that we usually used. I went on to use and refine it for multiple builds while serving as lead dev there and it improved our response time and the quality of our end product.
2016 – Tech Company and the Best Manager Ever
After Savage I applied for a job at BMC Technologies, the largest company I’d worked for. After a thorough interview process I was brought on as temp to hire. I was proud that the team decided to onboard me about a month early.
The manager had a challenging situation with team members spread out globally (unusual before the covid era) but handled it well with frequent checkins, delegating and good planning. I enjoyed the team probably the most out of any job I’d had until then, despite only meeting some of them once.
The first project he gave me was to re-evaluate their tag management system and revamp it. It was intimidating as I had never worked in the Adobe Marketing Suite before. Luckily, Adobe has plenty of material online so I quickly learned how those particular systems worked, how their existing system was built, redesigned and restructured logical divisions, found and fixed bugs and delays, improved load time, and worked with the analytics and AB testing teams to correct problems and improve things. I also worked with various other internal BMC teams to handle marketing related needs such as a marketing tag generator, how-to guides, integrations with third parties that required custom solutions and integrations with Adobe, strategy and implementation of tags and analytics tracking during a complete website rebuild, WordPress development for standalone websites for events and similar, and front end modules in the Adobe system for the new build. So lots of variety and heavy on the Adobe and integrations side of things.
One thing that I was particularly proud of was that I was able to implement and maintain zero cookie load throughout BMC public facing websites in my time there.
2018 – Freelance and Consulting
In 2018 I went part-time because of some family obligations and had to step back from BMC. I maintained a good relationship with them and have done two stand-alone jobs with them since then that lasted a few a few months each. I’ve also done many projects over this period with other past employers like CME Printing, and other local businesses.
Freelancing has given me a lot of freedom to try new things and I’ve been able to add React.js to my repertoire and deep dive into online training courses related to my chosen profession.
2024 – Looking Forward, Ready for More
In early 2024, with my family situation in a good position (read, kids entering school) I find myself wanting to connect with a regular team again and move back to full-time. I’m doing some college courses that will likely influence my future adventures.
