eWinery Integration (JFE)
I worked for Jackson Family Enterprises (JFE) as a contract hired programmer. This is where I realized that writing code professionally was much more rewarding than doing IT -- although I love the IT knowledge I have.
I am most proud of my work integrating the eWinery service into JFE custom websites. eWinery is a company that provides e-commerce services specifically tailored to the wine industry. JFE had hired someone before me to create this integration. The issue was that this older integration was buggy and slow especially with brands with large product catalogues.
I wrote two major components: An "age gate" and eWinery shopping cart.
The age gate prompts visitors to present their birthdays before being allowed into the website. This is very basic but it was designed to work with eWinery's checkout system.
I also wrote a shopping cart component. Like the agegate, the shopping cart component had to work with eWinery's cookie based API to transfer information between the JFE's brand websites and eWinery's checkout system.
eWinery Cart (non CMS) ZIP
What complicated things a bit is that JFE was also in the middle of moving their content away from hand coded sites towards Drupal CMS sites. My favorite accomplishment was turning these two components into Drupal modules. I had to learn the "Drupal way" of doing things to create proper modules that would hold up to the test of time. I am very happy that these items are being used today.
Inventory Lookup Tool (JFE)
I was also asked to build a unified search system for the tasting room sales people. Frequently clients would want to order several cases of a particular wine. Before my inventory search tool, sales people would have to search their local database, local warehouse, regional warehouse, and online inventories.
I created a web-based interface that would query a few locations and present what inventories were available in order to see if it was possible to fulfill the order.
Download ILT ZIP
Cambria Wines (JFE)
I rewrote several websites which were never made to last very long and ended up breaking modern browsers. One example is the Cambria site. Since the brand department was not ready to redesign the site, I was paid to make it work.
There was very little salvageable code, so I rewrote the site over the course of three weeks. The site's appearance did not change. I focused on making the pages load faster, making it easier to maintain, and of course make it function better with modern browsers.
JFE has since redesigned the website I rewrote. The original is available upon request. I would have it for show here but part of it is written in ASP and my server is a linux box.
Elvia's Child Care
My mom started a daycare center a few years back. My dad, siblings and I pitched in. I made her website. The goal was to make a simple site that is easy to navigate and that encourages people to come in for a visit.
Visit Elvia's Child Care
Maldo Studios
My friend Martin Maldonado is a very talented and creative person. He does graphic art, logo design, music, and more.
When he started to freelance his craft, he asked me to help him build his website. He wanted to get it done quickly but also wanted to learn in the process and so did I.
With his website I tried new tricks with CSS and JS which at this point are now old tricks. I built the site in a way that my friend could easily tinker with the JS and CSS.
This was also Martin's first Github experience. I showed him how this works too.
The site is really now maintained by him but the code origins are mine and I still help out when he needs some.
Visit Maldo Studios
iOS Roller Derby
It's a long story but I am a Roller Derby NSO. What this means is that I volunteer a few days out of the year to run the scoreboard for derby matches (aka bouts). The league I am associated with uses a very difficult to use and old (shockwave based) score board app.
I've been wanting to learn iOS development for a while. I decided that I would make a roller derby score board app as my first project. I have big plans for project beyond score boarding but since time has been limited, I am focusing on the main functionality.
You can see the source code on github.