About Me

Skills

I'm web developer with many years experience working in various web related roles, I have a wide range of skills: marketing, front end development, back end development and Unix systems administration. I mainly take on backend end development projects now, but with experience in these disciplines, I am able to work on a project with the full scope in mind. Clients find this approach to be extremely valuable as I am able to easily integrate with and provide experience and advice on all aspects of a project.

Front End Development

I create websites that allow the user to experience your website in the best and most appropriate way suited to the device they are using. By working using progressive enhancement, a website is delivered with a responsive layout that can best make use of the space available on the smallest to largest devices. I ensure cross browser compatibility by using feature detection so older browsers still in use today provide a solid experience, whilst modern browsers can go the next step and enhance the users time spent on your site. Writing semantic markup that is documented and easy to read, means that it can be maintained and scaled in the future, and allows co-workers to quickly pick it up. For many projects I used tools and open-source libraries such as jQuery, LESS, Git, Gulp, Bower, Node.js and Modernizr, which not only speed up my productivity, but are here mainly to build high performance and tested applications. A developer must have an exacting eye for detail just as a designer does. Although I wouldn't call myself a designer, I can use Photoshop to write pixel exact styled html. In many front end development roles and projects, I have been the centre figure between the design and back end development. With transitions, animations, effects or API calls, there is a wide variety of ways to interact and so on, the web is more immersive than ever. This level of immersion is just important to a user’s experience.

Marketing

I call myself as a Backend End Developer, but have a long history of marketing work too. While I believe, that best approach is to become absolute master in one aspect of creating a website, I also think that having applicable knowledge of other areas (such as marketing, system administration and front end development) helps to understand how all these aspects works together. Although I don't take on projects where I would do purely Marketing, I believe I can provide valuable marketing experience to a project, aim to achieve the same level of profit as marketer would and I'm just as comfortable preparing segments for email campaign or calculating ROI as I am writing code.

Back End Development

It's very hard to show something that is built in back end, mainly because this is the part of website called, software which interacts with API requests, servers javascript calls or handles data to/from databases. Even that is complicated to describe abstract things, this is my preferred area of the website. I like to code object oriented code in PHP, using design patterns in Model-View-Controller structures. Some of the projects have more than 100 000 lines of code and are coded by teams of programmers. To be able to work in such teams, we have concurent versioning systems (CVS) like Subversion or Git, which holds each change of code, when they were done and by whom. So we can keep track when the things started to break down.

Unix Systems Administration

I migrated away from Windows few years ago and currently I use Linux as my main and preferred operating system ( although I'm forced to use Mac OS X in work). I enjoy the community and the configurability that Unix system gives you, and don't need even speaking of the stability and security of Linux. I also create my own open-source libraries and share them on GitHub, such as the popular vagrant with ansible playbook.

Other

I enjoy writing and sharing my knowledge with others, in the form of blogs.