Twenty-four year old web developer living in Toronto, Ontario. For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by technology and how people interact with it. From computers, to mobile devices, and of course the Internet, I am passionate about the way people utilize technology to solve problems and improve their everyday lives. I leverage modern web technologies to evolve design into thoughtful, responsive, and accessible digital experiences which delight both clients and their users.
The redesign of the Durham College Corporate website was a ground up overhaul of the design, sitemap, content, and underlying technology stack. We began by partnering with a research company who worked with us to capture and understand key usage analytics. We worked closely with IT Services to build out modern underlying infrastructure for the new website. My team and I also re-evaluated our development strategy, bringing in new tools such as Git, Gulp, Sass, WP-CLI, SiteOrigin Page Builder, and WP Migrate DB Pro. In the backend, we used the CMB2 plugin to build out custom fields to store metadata. Many areas of the site required building custom Ajax endpoints to fetch specific metadata or perform frontend filtering. An array of new page components were created as SiteOrigin Page Builder widgets. After development was complete, we worked with our server administrators to configure several new tools such as Wordpress Super Cache (server caching), Hummingbird (browser caching of assets), and SEO framework. We rely on Siteimprove to monitor and resolve accessibility and SEO issues on an ongoing basis. It was an extremely rewarding project to be a part of, I gained a lot of new insight into all areas of our stack. The project spanned from mid 2016 through to late 2017, and continues post launch. Going forward, our team continues to build out new components and pages as new business needs are brought to our attention.
I was tasked with leading the development of a web based Interactive Campus Map for Durham College’s Communications and Marketing department. Prior to writing a single line of code, I carefully considered a variety of mapping technologies and web application frameworks to meet the following expectations of the project:
I eventually settled on a combination of AngularJS, gulp, Ionic, Leaflet and Angular-Leaflet, with directions and location information provided by Mapbox.
A considerable effort was also spent mapping the pathways of our campus buildings and wings. This data was contributed back to the OpenStreetMaps project.
The rebuilding of the Continuing Education area of the Durham College website was a two-phase project. While it does exist inside the main durhamcollege.ca installation, the site uses a newer set of “dc2” templates that were built from the ground up for the Alumni area redesign that occurred previously. The site makes use of modern web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, and Ajax to deliver a compelling user experience. Since then, many other smaller areas of the site have also been migrated to this platform such as orientation, 50th Anniversary of Ontario Colleges, and even the site-wide top bar and quick links.
The second phase of the project involved applying this new design to the actual CE program pages (which exist in an external database, hosted by IT Services). Over the course of several months, our 3 teams worked closely together to build out a solution. This comprised of custom Oracle database API's created by IT, and using url query parameters in conjunction with the PHP OCI8 library to out build pages. On top of that, users are able to add courses to their shopping cart, and check out. Since the old website was not https://, payment had to be made using a system hosted by IT services. I worked on a custom JavaScript shopping cart solution which stores selected courses in localstorage, then passes that data (with a unique user identifier token) and transitions the user over to the secured payment area.