Work Experience
Yahoo!
Yup, I am back at Yahoo!. I even missed my convocation to come down to Sunnyvale, California. Super happy with the gig and the opportunity to do cool stuff that millions of people will use every day. I like to think that I belong to the special ops of Yahoo!. Whoo-ah!
Bean Services
I worked for Bean Services for almost 3 years as a Web Architect. Really, I was the lead Frontend Engineer and Web Designer for their online Accounts Payable Automation Software as a Service BeanBills. It was a great experience. I grew significantly, especially in my designing abilities. I also learned a lot about web startups and how the environment differs significantly from a large corporate environment, specifically in project management.
When I started, Bean was just starting their new version of Beanbills. When I left Bean, Beanbills was a stable, sellable product. The entire team poured endless hours into Beanbills and I know it will do well :).
Check out Bean Services
Yahoo! Photos 3.0
Technically, the project I was working on should have been called Yahoo! Photos 2.0, but it was such a huge leap from Yahoo! Photos 1.0, that we decided it needed to be called 3.0.
I interned as a Frontend Engineer for a year on the Yahoo! Photos project (RIP). It was an awesome experience and it really started my career as a legitimate Frontend Engineer. When we started working on Photos, "Rich Web Application" was a brand new buzzword (as well as AJAX). The environment was insanely hot, and a lot of people were doing really cool things.
Photos was really awesome, you could drag and drop your photos for organization or adding them to albums, you could create smart albums (basically an album based on a saved search), there was a DHTML slideshow, contextual help tips, photo tagging, and even hamsters. We were doing some cutting edge stuff, and we had a really great team.
Photos shut down, but you can check out some footage for Photos at Scott's website here and here
Intersoft Technologies Ltd.
Intersoft was my first gig as a web developer. I worked creating a mobile version of their existing real estate management system. I do not think that Blackberry's web browser has evolved much in that time. Imagine creating a website that does not support any css. I also worked on a DHTML text editor and a socket based email reader.
Contract Experience
First Landmark
Home page of First Landmark, so fresh and so clean
I designed and developed the website for First Landmark. The general philosophy for the design was to keep it as clean as possible. This philosophy is also reflected in the markup. I really like the warm earth based colours: they really compliment and bring out the images of the properties. The fonts and the sharp corners make the site look extremely professional.
I played around with some CSS3 including RGBA and the first-letter selector (which is awesome!). I wrote the animation utility for the slideshow of the property photos. I think it is cool to have the images of the properties on the actual property page instead of having to go to another slideshow page to look at the images.
Paradise Inn
Paradise Inn was a project that was handed down to me from Scott Schiller. Though the design has stayed essentially the same, the site has changed significantly since Scott worked on it. I wrote a slideshow utility for the property images that uses an XML list of the properties to go to the associated property folder, and then dynamically obtain a list of the images in the property folder. I also added a new section for fractional ownership and built an administration tool for Paradise to set the prices and availability of the properties.