Summary
As I sit down and start thinking back, I realise I've worked on the internet for a little over 20 years now… Damn. That's one way to make myself feel old! :sweat_smile:
It all started back in 2005. Everyone my age was obsessed with MySpace. (Slightly) obsessed with it myself, my natural interest in design and technology eventually converged with the amount of time I was spending on the platform. Curiosity got the better of me, and as a result I learned how to create my own custom profile layouts without using the online generators everybody else was using. Wowed by my ‘skillz’, I went on to design and build them for my friends and family, and eventually even strangers.
The HTML and CSS I'd learned by customising MySpace profiles led me on to design and build whole websites for local businesses, bands and artists. The additional responsibility that came with being trusted to deliver these larger projects forced me to drastically improve my coding knowledge and abilities. I quickly learned the importance of building websites the ‘proper’ way – by my own fair hand, rather than with Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editor.
By the age of 18, following the completion of my secondary education and when all of my friends went on to study at university, I decided to take a leap of faith and use my self–taught design and development skills to enter the world of full–time employment.
For the 8 years that followed, I worked as a web designer and front-end developer for Jadu, a market–leading enterprise CMS and e–forms software vendor in the UK, whose headquarters just happened to be in my home town. I was given the opportunity to not only work on some very large websites, but also learn the fundamentals of design, and what makes for a great user experience.
After my first few years at Jadu I realised front-end development was where my true passion lied, and gradually moved away from designing websites. I'd become fluent in HTML 5, CSS 3 and jQuery, and adopted all of the front-end frameworks and build tools that emerged during that time, such as Sass, Grunt and Gulp. I also learned how to use Git for version control and how to write code that was accessible and performant.
The sheer size of the websites we built – and the broad demographic of those who used them – placed a high degree of importance on improving my front-end skills even further. It became second nature to build websites that were not only W3C valid and WAI WCAG level 2 compliant, but which also responded seamlessly on all devices that had a web browser, no matter how big or small they were.
I appreciate great design and have a keen eye for detail, ensuring the designer's original vision is always carried through to the end product. I also have a healthy knowledge of UX as a practice, having attended numerous conferences and training courses to improve on this over the years.