What do I do?
I’m now a full-time, freelance web developer/designer after 3 years working at web agencies in Manchester, so feel free to get in touch with questions, requests for quotes, etc!
About Me
Think of this as a brief CV of of my skills and interests…
Coding
I work in OO PHP5 with development experience of Content Management Systems for a number of years. I’m experimenting with various design patterns, in particular MVC using CakePHP.
For the front-end I work in XHTML (aiming for strict) with CSS. I’ve been geeking off on jQuery recently, which is pretty amazing stuff. I can turn a design around in a few days with valid markup and CSS from a PSD and I use microformats when it’s appropriate.
Databases
I’ve found myself getting into RDBMS more than I imagined with finding data structure overlooked in too many open source projects; I feel like this is the source of a good project. MySQL5 is my current package – I’m discovering more about the usefulness of views and stored procedures, which I’m hoping can really improve the back-end performance of some CMS projects along with transactions through InnoDB tables.
Professional
Early on, working with web development I spent time freelancing but most recently I’ve been Production Manager at a web agency specialising in working with charities and non-profits, working with four other developers. This can be as a developer myself realising projects from the brief through to delivery liaising with clients and working with designers and other developers as well as being in a supportive role to the rest of the team working with schedules and the like.
From some of my first projects, I’ve had a hand in e-commerce fom using old perl scripts to writing my own e-commerce bolt-on to our in-house CMS. I’ve done some work with OSCommerce and more recently experimenting with Magento.
Im terms of web development, I’m keen on performance issues from query optimisation and server/client-side caching techniques.
Interests
At university I got hooked on accessibility and usability (which ended up being my final project, applying that to open source CMS), which lead me into internationalisation. I many ways these areas are all linked and should be considered through all stages of development.
A lot of understanding these lead me into the significance of the semantic web, or at least in writing semantically correct code. Microformats fit well into this.
I’m really into the ideas surrounding the socialisation of the web; identity, networking sharing, etc.
I try and tinker with web APIs when I can, to understand how to reuse and mash-up data; I feel that my interest in the social nature of the web embraces all of these things along with basic social psychology.
Away from work I’m into writing/performing music, film-making/screenwriting & photography. When there’s time!
