Background
This being my first job, it was a brand new experience for me. Thankfully I got to work with some awesome people in a great city! I got to experience 2 and a half years of challenges, experiences and adventures within the travel industry for which I am truly grateful.
My role here evolved from being a web developer to becoming a front-end architect involved with several responsibilities such as selecting software frameworks for use in future projects, I.E. AngularJS and Foundation for Sites, defining the best code practices to use and collaborating with the lead back-end developer in order to understand any limitations on the new, Drupal-based, platform we were continuing forward with.
The projects I worked on
Some of the notable things I worked on were:
- easyJet Holidays
- England Rugby Travel
- Cruising Excursions
What I worked with and the skills I developed
Being my first commercial job, I developed several skills very rapidly. This job is where I discovered my passion for the front-end. This included (in no particular order):
- PHP
- Bower
- JavaScript
- LESS
- SCSS
- CSS
- Foundation 6
- PDF Creation
- Drupal 8
- jQuery
- jQuery UI
Crowning achievements
From easyJet Holidays:
- Optimisation of JavaScript using Gulp as a build tool.
- Improving the LESS build, by performing it on deployment rather than page-load.
- Converting TCPDF templates into HTML5 templates to create PDFs using wkhtmltopdf.
- Implementation of Bower to manage front-end dependencies such as jQuery and jQuery UI.
- Creation of deployment script to deploy site to multiple, load balanced, servers.
From England Rugby Travel:
- Optimisation of JavaScript using Gulp as a build tool.
- Improving the SCSS build, by performing it on deployment rather than page-load.
- Implementation of Foundation 6 for use in promotional PDFs created using wkhtmltopdf.
- Implementation of Bower to manage front-end dependencies such as Foundation and jQuery.
From Cruising Excursions:
- The opportunity to architect a fully responsive website.
- Creation and implementation of Gulp tasks to resize and optimise images for various devices.
- Usage of AngularJS to create a dynamic website using data retrieved from a Drupal platform.
- Creation and implementation of Gulp tasks to generate a sprite-sheet from separate source images.
- Setup of NodeJS to manage build dependencies.
- Creation of various custom components such as an itinerary slider.