Alphabet Soup

Portfolio for Jonathan Reid

 

Screenshot of Autonumbering feature

All of that is great, but what can I actually do? Here's the alphabet soup of my skills:

Because I started out in system and network administration, I have an in-depth understanding of the technologies and protocols involved in the internet. I still build my own servers from scratch, and host my own domains. My OS of choice is FreeBSD.

I went from system and network administration to database programming, so I speak SQL better than most DBAs (though I've always had problems visualizing outer joins for some reason). I'm most familiar with Informix, mySQL, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

For scripting languages I'm fluent in Perl and PHP, and I'm pretty good with Ruby and Python too. PHP was the language we developed DocBase Direct in, and I had got to the point where I was digging in to the source code for the interpreter to figure out certain things.

For compiled languages, I speak C, C++, and 4GL somewhat rustily. I also speak C# and Java fairly well, though my experience with them has been limited to interface development.

As for development platforms, I've got around 8 years of experience with Java servlets and JSPs, and I'm a contributing developer to the jCatapult project. I have two years of experience with Microsoft's .NET platform, and while I rely on backend developers to handle heavy-duty C# work, I can easily build my own components, Master Pages, and simple page logic.

I am an expert in semantic markup, CSS, Javascript, the DOM standard, and browser technologies. I love AJAX and other RESTful techniques. My preferred Javascript library is jQuery, but I'm quite capable of doing everything in DOM standard scripting, or picking up any of the other libraries and using them.

I'm also very knowledgeable about mobile development, and the state of mobile browser technologies. I have a little experience with writing iPhone applications. The challenge with mobile development is that mobile users have a different set of needs than desktop users, which means that they might require not only different design, but also different architecture. Providing a compelling mobile experience is extremely important; some studies indicate that within the next decade mobile devices will become the preferred method for accessing content on the web.