home

some front end examples, starting from gig / job application

"Please send at least 5 examples of relevant sites you have made, or worked on stating what your role was."

EXAMPLE: For the last six years, 5 - 10 hours a week, I have been developing and enhancing a web application that is a literal digital assistant for a law office. I say enhancing because I didn't start the project, but I've reworked it so much that I can call it "mine." My work on the system is cheaper than hiring a human assistant, and it makes a human assistant unnecessary. It's Linux, Apache, PHP, and started as MySQL. I have been moving the data to MongoDB. Soon I might get around to moving some of the code to Node.js, which is more compatible with Mongo than PHP is. The application is hosted on AWS EC2, so that makes me a perhaps-beyond-full stack developer down to the Linux sysadmin level. The system started in Drupal, but I am liberating it from Drupal. More details are on my resume.

The job description on hand "might" require references. My lawyer client will certainly serve as a reference, and I can think of several others.

Regarding troubleshooting skills, I did that more or less full time from 1997 - 1999, and those skills have only gotten better. I've done plenty of troubleshooting since.

Given the zillion lines of code I have in GitHub, I think that demonstrates I can use Git.

I list some (client-side) JavaScript examples below. In part to demonstrate that I am not delusional, as I implied, I tend towards full-stack business web applications rather than front-end "make me a pretty, public-facing website." I make no claim to be any sort of visual artist. There have been a number of times, though, that my "art" was close enough if the client knew more or less what he wanted to see. I have zero to little original artistic vision, but I can at least sometimes implement another's vision.

EXAMPLE: Speaking of artistic vision, I'd like to think that my numerology calculator "icon" is somewhat pretty:

Numerology Calculator
5345963677 3133331269

That is HTML, not an image. It's also a live link to my numerology calculator. I haven't substantially touched it since 2010, but it's a useful piece of JavaScript and is written to an objective standard.

Note that I take neither credit nor blame for any visual aspect of my father's website mentioned below. I did NOT create the site and have done minimal work on the front end, but I've done quite a bit of work behind the scenes keeping it going over the years and almost decades. The numerology calculator on his site got caught in the visual crossfire between my original and the WordPress "developer." Again, I take neither credit nor blame.

regarding WordPress (part 1)

I've fixed a number of problems and added a few features to my father's WordPress site over the years. EXAMPLE: All the work I've done on his site is listed as various entries on my resume as "project Numbers." I very specifically avoid "WordPress." I understand this job in question right now involves WordPress. I will come back to that in a moment. I want to show more stuff before I very carefully address the WordPress elephant.

EXAMPLE: The "flag project" parts 1 and 2 were visually demanding for my talent, or lack thereof. A client gave me a very detailed visual spec, and I did it such that he paid me for the mockup.

EXAMPLE: I hope my clock is a nice JavaScript example. There is some work on the back end of that, too. As I argue at some length, it should be a very accurate clock, and I make arguments that it's probably better than the official US NIST clock.

EXAMPLE: I wrote a Firefox extension for Facebook years ago. I didn't maintain it for quite a few reasons, but I believe I made my case (and the source code is still there) that it worked quite nicely, and it wasn't easy to accomplish.

EXAMPLE: In April, 2013 I wrote a Chrome extension that plucked phone numbers, email addresses, and snail addresses out of GMail and put them in Google Contacts.

EXAMPLES: my quick links / favorites. Roughly half of those are little, or not-so-little, applications I wrote. Some of them are just links to external sites.

EXAMPLE: Regarding Bootstrap, here is an example where I boiled down a zillion characters of Bootstrap CSS until I had what I needed. I was horrified at the thought of all that CSS for one example.

EXAMPLE: Drag and drop.

EXAMPLE: Use of a JavaScript class that helps the user be almost certain that data has really been saved.

EXAMPLE: My message form and the email notification has been confirmed in the real world several times.

EXAMPLE: interactive map - interactive in that it will save your location as a cookie, allowing you to set cookie expiration and such.

EXAMPLE: Moon phases

WordPress, part 2

The job description I'm answering eschews "agencies" (recruiters) and wants freelancers. I took WordPress off my resume because I don't want the sorts of companies that use recruiters to contact me about it. So far, I have not been a fan of WordPress, but I'd much rather freelance and do WordPress than work 9 - 5 doing anything.

I should remind myself that WordPress is open source, it uses an open-source language and database, and it runs on Linux. There are almost infinitely worse technologies and companies to work with. Also, if I am around WordPress fans, I might question them and see what they have done in it and come to appreciate it.

I could elaborate on WordPress, but I should let it rest for now.

page history

  1. 2022/07/11 19:29 - starting the standalone page
  2. This started as a June 11, 2022 blog entry.