Portfolio

I worked as a full-time Web Developer for Premier Media Group from September 4, 2007, until August 6, 2008. During this time I worked on a variety of projects culminating in the coordination of the Mind & Soul project.

I formed a significant part of the development team and created the majority of the XSLT, XHTML and CSS behind the Premier Media Group websites. I also coded a large number of C# pages and had an influence on the design decisions. Roald Sinissaar was the lead designer on these projects.

PT OnDemand offers bespoke personal training videos to a global audience. Users can pay for a series of workout videos using PayPal and track their progress over time using a workout tracker.

I was brought in after the previous developer failed to deliver the requirements. The project required a complete rewrite. I created unique features from scratch while using open source libraries to handle common elements like email validation with the EmailAddressValidator class and controller/view separation using Savant3 native-PHP templates.

PayPal integration was important to enable videos to be purchased. My system is a succinct object-orientated version of their name-value pair examples. Unfortunately PayPal provided verbose functions that were intrinsically linked with their examples. I halved their example code using inbuilt functions like http_build_query.

The videos had to be available and fast to download from all target countries. Amazon CloudFront provides world-wide performance with reduced start-up costs compared to excellent but expensive CDNs like Edgecast.

Solar Empire took a large amount of my childhood. It was brilliant inadvertent training in software development and team projects. During the time when I was an active developer we had over 200 active players producing over 50000 hits per day; cumulatively, our distributions have been downloaded over 40000 times. At the time it was an active rewarding community but the central developers eventually left for bigger things. The project is on hold until I find a team of competent developers who want to continue development in their spare time.

GoodScripts was a major project that began as my GCSE ICT coursework. It developed into an excuse to spend countless hours learning PHP and web layout skills, creating a script storage system like HotScripts and Scripts.com. The project was successful — it worked — but I stopped developing it after I realised that it was not a viable competitor to these existing resources.

A sophisticated artist-portfolio, Deborah Jane is the homepage for a talented young artist living in Aberystwyth, Wales. It contains all of the elements of an artist's portfolio including the Artists Statement and example work from three different artistic mediums. The page was enjoyable to design as it was an opportunity to explore typographic techniques and combine these with delightfully unique source images.

On the technical side: I used my small PHP class QuickSite in conjunction with mod_rewrite to create a clean http interface that makes sense to search engines. The simple PHP inclusion system caches dynamically generated HTML pages to generate a static website on-the-fly (processing internal links and images). This all happens incredibly fast and produces an efficient user interface.