I've been working professionally as a web developer since 2007 (and have been creating personal websites since the IE6 days!); the act of creating an application from nothing more than characters typed into an editor never ceases to feel like magic.
While web dev takes up a lot of my time, I love creating all sorts of different projects on the side. I created this site to show a few projects I've done in the recent past.
I've had the good fortune to work for two different ad agencies, crafting digital experiences with all sorts of bells and whistles. I served as the sole developer for a number of sites that were awarded Gold and Silver Birmingham ADDY awards in 2014 and 2015.
During a total rebrand and platform migration undertaken by my employer at the time, a large corporate bank, I worked closely with our head UX designer to take newly re-branded component designs and translate them into modular component code. At the end, I had created dozens of components documented in a "Playbook" website that I handed over to the platform migration team to fully templatize.
Back in the glory days of Flash, I persuaded a client who wanted a slideshow header with complex animation to go with JS animations (using Raphael.js). I was able to make a fully responsive animated slideshow to spec, and the client was quite happy when they could pull it up on their iPhone.
The latest big initiative I've been working on in my current position is micro-frontends; I developed the UI components for our proof-of-concept Genomics Results project, which launched in January 2023. The really neat thing is that having a focused, light-weight, feature-based repo means that deployments can happen independently from our main (very large and highly complex) application. It also presented the opportunity to try out some new tools that weren't being used in our main repo, namely Vite and Typescript.
As the web continues to evolve, I continue to pick up new skills and experiences. I started out in middle school with an Angelfire site, leveled up to creating fully-custom Wordpress templates, and now my day-to-day coding is in React with Redux-Saga and Sass + CSS modules. And my daily tools/stack will grow and evolve as the web continues to change.