myblog.cv

Hello
I’m Jake

Experience

NOV 2019 - CURRENT

OneAgency - Front End Web Developer

Joining a large dev department as a Front End developer has allowed me to focus almost entirely on my Front End skills furthering my knowledge massively, while soaking up all the information coming from the Back End developers allowing me to further both skills ‘asynchronous’.
First project upon joining was a Drupal 8 website, with little knowledge about this CMS beforehand I was able to build and supply the site within the month it came in. I liked being thrown in the deep end and the learning experience but not sure I like Drupal!
When approached by a company looking for a Laravel product configurator I was able to pick up Laravel and create a proof of concept for the pitch. We won this and moving forward I was the sole Front End on the project creating a fully functional product configurator using a combination of Laravel, Blade, Vue, SCSS and some SVG trickery.
Away from the coding I’ve been able to take ownership of projects for the first time and manage the development side of them, this means making sure all other developers have what is needed/know what they are doing and making sure I am doing what I can to keep my project running as smoothly as possible.
When told by a project manager I had a week to build a website complete with partial CMS integration I knew our traditional WordPress approach was not going to cut it. From a previous personal project I knew about a CMS that would build the Back End for me while I built the Front End, this meant introducing the concept of node.js to the agency and convincing management it was a worthwhile investment. The site was built in a week and continues to perform exceptionally well while leaving a very happy client as their expectations were thoroughly exceeded.
outside of work it’s been during this time I’ve been looking more heavily into JavaScript frameworks other than Vue, mainly React and Svelte. While I’m yet to use these in a production environment I have several of my own projects using these. Having personal projects is very important to me, being able to learn new skills in a “real life” environment is how I work best.

JAN 2018 - OCT 2019

Creative Sponge - Web Developer

Due to joining a small team of devs I was able to focus more heavily on my Front-End work and picked up lots of new skills for creating stunning designs using SCSS and JavaScript but finding CSS only solutions where possible.
The majority of projects involved working with a PHP WordPress backend and a custom theme, because of this my PHP knowledge has increased significantly, allowing me to work comfortably with PHP websites and applications. outside of work I played around with Laravel and Laravel Nova to further my PHP understanding and to get a better knowledge of these PHP frameworks.
Worked on projects that used Front-End frameworks such as React.js and Vue.js. This allowed me to continue learning vanilla JavaScript and lessen my tendency to go to jQuery where possible. On a personal note these projects were the ones I enjoyed the most, being able to use new and exciting frameworks and the opportunity to learn what we could do with them was amazing.
While the majority of projects were PHP and WordPress based, I had the chance to work on other languages and CMS’ including Django and Silverstripe. This involved work to both Front-End and Back-End.
All projects used version control in the form of Git/BitBucket however for some outside of work projects I had to use other VCS such as Perforce for handling my Unity game files.

DEC 2015 - NOV 2017

360 Brand and Digital - Web Developer

Started out as an apprentice before creating a role for myself and moving up to junior within 3 months.
Worked as sole in house developer for the company working on a wide range of projects.
Primarily worked in HTML/XHTML with CSS and JavaScript/jQuery with the occasional use of LESS.
Other projects included a PHP application to run on betting terminals, a Ruby on Rails application for job recruitment and several ecommerce sites that included OpenCart and Shopify.
Acted as System Admin handling the companies digital assets and server management using providers such as Digital Ocean for cloud based infrastructure.
Handled all DNS management for both the company and clients, and controlled CloudFlare accounts.
Created and maintained several e-commerce sites using a wide range of technologies such as OpenCart, Magento and Shopify to name a few.

Education

SEPT 2013 - APRIL 2015

Develop College Norwich - BTEC Level 3 Extended

Entered college onto a BTEC Level 3 course in Information and Creative Technology. The course went over a wide range of subjects including computer hardware/software, creating games, making flash animations (a little redundant now!) and designing and building websites. At the end of the first year I was offered a place to stay on for the following year to do my Extended course which I finished with DMM overall.