In my second year of university, I took a User Experience unit. In this unit, we learnt about the key theories behind user experience and then had to implement these theories by mocking up a job app similar in function to Indeed.
Following on from developing the HitTastic! site we had to create a site in PHP that allows users to view POI’s stored in a database, and contribute to this database. We had to do some basic styles to go along with it.
In my second year of university, I did a PHP unit where we were tasked with creating a site showing the number one songs from a certain year. We had to make a login, connect to a database, and perform a search. This was to teach us the basics of PHP and SQL for us to complete our assignment, creating a website for viewing and reviewing points of interest.
Whilst I was searching for a placement I had a few tasks to complete for various roles I was interviewing for. One of these tasks was to create a simple Hangman game in PHP.
This band posted an advert on Facebook for a Web Developer. I approached them and they needed help making their site mobile friendly. They had a friend build them the site using some sort of framework, the code was a mess, resulting in the site being slow and not mobile-friendly. I cleaned the site up, updated some content as their new album had just been released, and gave them the finished copy of the site.
You may have read Re-creating my portfolio with React where I talked about my experiences converting my simple static portfolio into a React website, turning reusable objects on the page into React components. This inspired me to learn Gatsby, a static site generator that uses React.
I was previously using my a category on my photography WordPress blog to host my blogs about web design and projects. This was a bit of a weird experience for users as if they chose to read more about a post on my portfolio, they’d be directed to my photography site. Gatsby allows me to pull in all the posts from WordPress and create a new site. This also allowed me to store all of my portfolio items as WordPress posts. I installed the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to handle the tech icons and button links.
The site is now insanely fast hosted on Netlify and using Server Side Rendering. Gatsby’s links also make navigating from page to page incredibly quick.
Whenever I want to add content to the site I just login to WordPress, create a new post under the relevant category, with a tag for if I want it to be displayed on the homepage of my portfolio. I hit publish and a new Netlify build is queued then deployed using the Jamstack deployments plugin.
I want to build every website this way in the future. It took me about 2 days to set up, so it’s incredibly quick to develop. Plus, sites are faster and more secure on the Jamstack.
In my first year of University I had a go at creating a chat app using Firebase following my lecturers instructions. I was the only person in my class to succeed. Go ahead, type something.
