Design

I got into web design in 1998 so that I could help out with my game clan's website. Within a few months, I was writing markup by hand and using CSS to style it. My first table-less design was in 2002, and my last active table-based design was converted to using CSS in 2004. I started exploring responsive web design in 2012 for work.

My style has evolved quite a bit throughout the years. A lot of my early designs feature digital paintings that frame the site's content, now I let the content drive the design. The one thing that hasn't change is my commitment to progressive enhancement. The user should never think they're looking at a broken design, but users with a modern browser will receive the best experience.

• HTML
• CSS
• Sass
• Responsive Web Design
• User Experience
• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Inkscape

Programming

Programming became a part of my skill set in 2002 when I needed to write small programs and web applications. I picked up a bit of Scala in 2012, but quickly moved on to Haskell. Writing code involves a lot more trial and error and Google-fu than my other skills. When it comes to solving complex programming problems, I find that it helps to draw them out on paper.

• Haskell
• Scala
• Pike
• PHP
• JavaScript

Databases

Working with databases is a relatively new discipline for me. I was introduced to the world of databases in 2002 with MySQL for managing my online diary, but I didn't take it seriously until 2005 when I started working on Gamependium. I began exploring triggers and query optimization in 2012 when I started working with millions of rows of data.

• Data Modeling
• PostgreSQL
• PLpgSQL
• MySQL
• Query Optimization

I inherited a database refactoring project where the original data was coming from three different sources. The biggest challenge was pulling data from their primary data source: Netsuite. Due to a lack of a client accessible data dumping tools, I was forced to fetch the data via the JDBC Foreign Data Wrapper. Some of the source tables contained over 500 columns. Additionally, there were a number of text fields that needed to be parsed and converted to normalized fields, such as phone numbers or hours of operation. The project was cut short due to lack of funding.

My primary project was to redesign their MySQL database and convert it to PostgreSQL. Of the ~400 tables that comprised their database, ~200 of them were responsible for storing product data. I devised a schema that would use ~30 tables to manage the same amount of data while still being normalized. The simpler schema meant a simpler code base and would provide a better experience for the user. This project was canceled while I was in the process of writing the conversion.

My first project was a web application to manage the planning of flyers for a grocery store. We used it as an experiment on how we were going to rewrite a similar application that runs snapd. The first version was written in PHP using the Zend framework, but I found it to be difficult to maintain in the long run. After exploring frameworks in both Scala and Haskell, I settled on Haskell's Snap framework. Over the course of 2 months, the application was completely rewritten and included a number of improvements over the original.

I've submitted a few patches to improve support for the HTML standard. Such changes include fixing a minor validation error in the digestive-functors-heist package and adding support for the multiple attribute on select and file input elements (the later is new for HTML5).

• Remove path information from Choice input element values
• Updated Choice type to allow for multiple choices
• Add support for a list of files via <input type="file" multiple />

I made a minor adjustment to make the library compatible with Scotty 0.7 and Digestive Functors 0.7. I needed to use the newer versions of those libraries for a project I was working on at Zalora. Note that the pull request was made while the repo was hosted on Bitbucket, so it isn't linked to my GitHub account.

• Now compatible with Scotty 0.7 and Digestive Functors 0.7

My primary contributions here are in the form of support on the issue tracker. I assist in helping triage new issues, from pointing out duplicates to resolving user errors.

I rewrote their collection of Flexbox mixins for the 0.12 version. The original mixins were for the 2009 Flexbox specification, but a few browsers had been supporting the standard specification from 2012 for quite a while when I made the pull request.

• New Flexbox Mixins