Zollie

Development

Front-End?

Software development is often lumped into ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ roles. Front-end work deals with what users can see and interact with – a button on a website, the layout of a page. Whereas back-end development deals with what is going on behind the scenes – data administration and transformation.

Leaning?

My experience with back-end development is currently not as extensive, but that’s slowly changing. I’m full-stack trained and always learning. My code is written with an eye toward readability and maintainability. I love writing documentation, research and collaboration.

Front-End Leaning

Development

Front-End?

Software development is often lumped into ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ roles. Front-end work deals with what users can see and interact with – a button on a website, the layout of a page. Whereas back-end development deals with what is going on behind the scenes – data administration and transformation.

Leaning?

My experience with back-end development is currently not as extensive, but that’s slowly changing. I’m full-stack trained and always learning. My code is written with an eye toward readability and maintainability. I love writing documentation, research and collaboration.

Front-End Leaning

Development

Coding Successes

Overlapping Objects

Our photo-editors were spending hours hunting down overlapping 3D droplets (roughly 10,000 per bottle). This tool allows them to speed that process up without losing creative control.

UV Align

A plugin our artists were relying on wasn't being updated, so we made a lightweight replacement for it. It adds simple alignment tools to the “UV Editor” (a tool that unwraps 3D objects into a 2D form).

Photoshop Automation

We cut 60+ hours/month of monotonous work from the Anheuser-Busch team’s Photoshop workflow. One employee said the effort "has saved my sanity and massively increased productivity."

Dynamic Tables

I researched and installed the underlying tech for Benevolent Tech's tables. Clients later requested filtering, pagination, etc. - easy, the table already had the features.

Dynamic Aspect Ratios

We were routinely customizing our sliders for different aspect ratios. We reworked the code so one slider could be re-used anywhere given a specified aspect ratio.

Caching Requests

Our API requests were too high during development. So we created a database to cache search results. Requests immediately subsided by about 50%.

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Competencies

Primary TechSupporting TechDetailsProduct(s)
Blender PluginsPython, BlenderI help a group of hardworking CGI artists take on some of their most challenging issues. It's incredibly rewarding - all parties invovled often end-up relieved.
Photoshop AutomationJavaScript, Adobe ExtendScript, Photoshop CCArmstrong-White was bogged down by a monotonous, inefficient workflow. It was taking their editors 30 minutes just to setup one Photoshop document for Anheuser-Busch. We reduced that to less than a minute. With a current volume of 120+ documents per month, that’s at least 60 hours saved each month.
WordPressCSS + Sass, CMS configuration (Elementor, WP Bakery), CloudwaysThis very site is built with WordPress. In addition to front-end concerns, I also research and manage the tech dependencies (front & backend). On the other sites, I functioned as a front-end designer/developer. Benevolent Tech, Suncesailing
CraftHTML + Twig, CSS + Sass, JavaScript, CMS configuration, CloudwaysMy time was split between HTML, styling, and CMS configuration. I also installed and tweaked some existing code using JavaScript. District Bridges, Suncesailing, DC Facades
JekyllHTML + Liquid, CSS + Sass, JavaScript, Ruby, YAML, CloudflareThe lion's share of my time was spent customizing HTML and styling. I used JavaScript to install and tweak existing code. And when necessary, I used Ruby and YAML for configuration concerns. DC Facades, Suncesailing
React NativeJSX, CSS, HTMLAs a final project for Dev Bootcamp, my team and I built React Native application that connected to a Rails API. Easy Noms, unpolished personal projects
NodeJavaScript, Heroku, MochaI spun up a node API and wrote unit tests for a rigorous interview process that lasted a few weeks. It was my first time using Node, but now I feel comfortable jumping into the framework again.A private middleware API
RubyHTML + ERB, CSS, PostgreSQL, Heroku, RSpec, Jasmine, Ruby on Rails, SinatraI spent a ton of time working with Ruby during and after Dev Bootcamp. It is the first general purpose language I became comfortable with.A private tool for Detective, unpolished educational projects
Command-LineBash, SSH, VIMI'm comfortable writing terminal commands and SSH-ing into remote repositories. My VIM experience is still budding, but I can use it when necessary.
GitBitbucket, GithubI'm comfortable working with teams and following Git strategies. I write clear commit messages and can avoid/fix most merge conflicts.
IDESublime, Dash Doc, Emmet, Babel, AtomI've been happy with Sublime's ability to handle mounted remote repositories (SSHFS). It has great syntax highlighting, is highly customizable, and because of its ubiquity, there are a ton of tools for it. Beyond Sublime, I have also used Atom (for its ability to run Adobe Scripts), a little VIM (when working on remote repos), and I'm currently testing out Visual Studio.
Testing and Error HandlingRSpec (Ruby), Mocha (JS), Jasmine (JS)TDD gives me confidence in my code. It helps with diagnosing and locating errors as well as avoiding silent errors. Reducing maintenance costs is by far my biggest focus lately. In addition to testing & error handling, I've also been working on my pattern and anti-pattern recognition.
Object Oriented ProgrammingRuby, JavaScriptWhile I've studied some functional programming on the side, most of my experience is with OOP. In either case, I favor code that is readable, modular, and extensible.