I have been wanting to pull together a bunch of my previous work for a portfolio for a while. Well that time came this weekend. It was really fun to reflect on my past projects.
I couldn’t find a way to work in every project I have ever done, but I was able to come up with enough on the really personally impactful ones that I learned a ton from. I was thinking it might be good to jot down a few notes on some of these projects. Here are highlights from three of my past projects.
LearnFlash.com
It’s pretty interesting how I stumbled into making screencasts on how to use Flash. When I started developing web applications with .NET I didn’t have much time to learn the tools and language. I actually only had a few weeks to get the first prototype of my company’s proprietary Learning Management System up and running. I discovered LearnVisualStudio.com and it was a great start. The author of these screencasts had sent out an email a year or so later looking for people with extensive experience with a few select tools. I had been using flash since it’s first official release and thought I would audition. So I submitted my first pass at teaching somebody how to use flash. Surprisingly I was selected and given the opportunity to author two courses, Introduction to Flash and Building Websites in Flash. Judging from the royalties and all of the comments I received from students of these courses it did pretty well. I took several important things from this project:
- Planning and organizing thoughts is crucial if you want people to actually understand you
- Don’t use big words just for the sake of using them
- Demonstration and Prototyping leave very little room for design and should not
- Have fun with freelance, if you are working at 2am and have to go to work at 8am you should be enjoying what you are doing
Atomic Comics
This is probably my favorite project of all time. Because of the challenges that I faced in getting this completed and of course the content. I love comic books, I have been reading since my dad brought me a pile of MetalMen comics from a yard sale in the eighties. There is something especially imposing about developing a website or in the case a Content Management System to house something that is extremely important to you. The client wanted a publishing platform that they could manage on their own after the site was live. As a developer I love this idea, build the thing then let them handle the content. It is a dream, but it takes a lot of effort to pull this off in a successful way, because when you are all done this site has to be able to work for a reasonable amount of time with very little to no maintenance to be a success. The hardest part of this entire project was the very first decision, what content platform to build it on(Drupal, Joomla, DNN, etc…). Having completed the project I really wonder if it had been faster and easier if we had selected one of the other platforms or possibly even built a platform(which I had done in the past). But all and all I am happy with how the site turned out and it went on to function successfully for about four years with no maintenance at all. Sadly, the shops closed in 2011. But the memory lives on in the film “Kick Ass” which features the company throughout.
PopcornWar.com
The idea of PopcornWar came from where most great ideas do, the need to compete with my buddies in battle of wits(or movie box office prediction). We had decided that we would start a fantasy movie league. Being a nerd, I really wanted to have a way we could all keep track of how we were doing and also automate the box office calculations and rankings. Luckily, a golden opportunity was handed to me when we lost power at my house due to the great halloween snow storm of 2011. Since I had nothing to do and a few hours of battery on my laptop I started prototyping the site. In two days I had a fully functioning proto type and it was game on. I plan to release a public version of the game sometime in the near future. Though there is so much more to do when you take something pretty simple that is fun for you and your friends and try to take it to the professional level.
To be continued…
