About Me

Details:

Primary Tasks:

Details:

This was just a switch back to my old Front-End Developer position at Hanson. About 6 months after the Covid-19 pandemic began business stabilized and the development work picked back up again.

Though in the 6+ years I’ve been at Hanson Inc. the type of work that I have done has slowly shifted from maintenance originally to more full site builds. Our work shifted from building and maintaining sites for clients to building sites with a CMS so that the client can handle the maintenance themselves.

Primary Tasks:

• Performed maintenance on pre-existing code, sometimes adding to or improving the code to bring it to modern standards
• Worked in and lead teams building new sites from the ground up using a variety of CMS platforms and statically with HTML
• Interfaced and modified APIs to serve additional data from CMSs for site builds
• Conducted quality assurance tests and updates on my own code and others’
• Built and tested HTML email templates to be used in email marketing software
• Complied with ADA and WCAG specifications while building sites
• Lead and participated in remote and in-person client training sessions
• Worked directly with clients managing projects, while maintaining scope and implementing changes

Details:

This was a position that I took over for about 6 months right at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic due to a lull in development work. It was a huge adjustment switching from a development role to more of a planning role. As a developer I would just have to get the website to the already determined end state whereas as a Functional Architect I was one of the people attempting to figure out what that end state would look like. It was challenging because I was essentially throwing things at a blank wall to see what stuck.

Other than the difficult shift of how I approached my work, this gave me an insight into how work gets started and the thought that goes into how users are going to use a site or app. I was tasked with thinking all the options through and figuring out the most user friendly way and I think that is a beneficial perspective for a developer to have.

Primary Tasks:

• Created app/website wireframes during the pre-build and strategy planning process
• Assisted in defining the scope of the work that we were going to be responsible for during the life of a project
• Participated in usability testing in an attempt to get a better idea of how a user would interact with a site/app
• Created app flows to break down all the different screens of an app

Details:

When I was entering my third co-op at Hanson I had no idea how little I knew about front-end development. I had always breezed through my classes so this was an eye opening and humbling experience. Seeing what some of the other more experienced developers knew off-hand really prepared more for all the knowledge that I would have to learn and learn fast.

I had the opportunity to learn and work with JavaScript (politics between colleges made classes unavailable in my program), PHP, code repositories, Sass, Grunt, multiple different content management systems, and so much more. Also getting to work in a fast paced, modern style digital agency with extremely talented and ambitious professionals helped sculpt how I see myself as a developer and where I want to go with my career. I have been able to identify the parts of digital agencies that I thoroughly enjoy and the parts that I just have to suck it up and deal with. All in all this was one of biggest influences on my professionally so far.

Primary Tasks:

• Performed maintenance on pre-existing code, sometimes adding to or improving the code to bring it to modern standards
• Worked in and lead teams building new sites from the ground up using a variety of CMS platforms and statically with HTML
• Interfaced and modified APIs to serve additional data from CMSs for site builds
• Conducted quality assurance tests and updates on my own code and others’
• Built and tested HTML email templates to be used in email marketing software
• Complied with ADA and WCAG specifications while building sites
• Lead and participated in remote and in-person client training sessions
• Worked directly with clients managing projects, while maintaining scope and implementing changes

Details:

This was the best college job that I could ask for. I had an office on campus that I was able to go to between classes and work, the work was related to my career path, and I was able to use my time working in the marketing office as two of my three required co-ops to graduate.

Any website updates or HTML emails that the colleges wanted would get funneled to our team of three to five student workers to handle. Many times we handled the planning and development of these without any outside help. It was my first real taste of what working with clients would be like.

Primary Tasks:

• Used Adobe Creative Suite to create campus digital signage
• Created HTML emails for marketing campaigns
• Worked with faculty and staff to update and maintain the university website via a CMS