This project was my first major effort after leaving Bluebeam Inc. This is a full stack ecommerce site, using Next.js, Tailwind and Typescript on the frontend, and a PostgreSQL database and Prisma ORM on the backend. I designed it based on my years of experience, building all aspects of the app myself. I really enjoyed mapping out the relational database, and building features like the wishlist was especially fun and challenging. It's a generally different experience if a user is logged in or out, with many things working differently. I've leared a lot while making this project, and still go back to polish and add new features from time to time.

I spent the builk of my time at Bluebeam Inc. working on Bluebeam Cloud. I successfully led development of the Punch 2.0 feature, a reimagining of the original Punch page which added many features that customers had been hungry for for many years. This was first experience with leading frontend development, and I had to manage a lot more than just my own code. I was involved in sprint planning, expecation management, and communicating across discipline to manage expectations and help build the best feature possible. This work also involved getting feedback directly from customers on many occasions. My success with this feature lead to many of the reusable components I built being used across Bluebeam Cloud, I was very happy to help drive success not just on my team, but across the company. My work helped build customer confidence and drive subscription numbers at a crucial point in Bluebeam Cloud's growth and development.

Looksee was a project that my team built toward the end of my time at Jigsaw XYZ, Inc. It is a property solutions app for South Africans who face regular power and water outages as part of load shedding efforts in the places that they live. The goal was to help communicate information about upcoming outagess, and also offer solutions through a marketplace to help these folks deal with this every day problem. I found this project to be really inspiring, and it helped shape my mission as a Software Engineer - to help people with real everyday problems. I worked predominantly on the marketplace. As it was a small team, I owned many of the pieces of features I built myself. I really honed my skill for componentization and reusability, deadlines were often tight and the project was very fast moving, so being able to reuse code and share it with teammates was important. I really grew as a developer on this project, as it was the first project where I took ownership of so many large parts of the code base. As my coding skill grew, so did my confidence, and I was glad whenever a teammate would pick up a component I'd built and reuse it for something they were working on. Some of the original vision for Looksee has changed since we launched it, but I'm proud that much of my code for the marketplace is still being used to this day.

I built this WeatherApp over a weekend, with the goal being to refresh my familiarty with React Native. I've always found React Native to be far more approachable than even regular React, but hadn't used it directly in some time. This WeatherApp shows the current weather based on your location, the upcoming forecast for the next 5 days, and some information about the city that you are located in. I built this project using create-expo-app, and got to play with more recent expo router changes which I had heard of but not directly used. The navigation is file structure based, which is very similar to how Next.js routing works.

Calendar App was an app with a simple idea - build a calendar that shows the holidays for different countries. I added some fun twists, like making sure to show the last couple days of the previous month, and the first few days of the next month. It was one of those things that I was sure I could do, but had never really sat down and tried. So I did some research, and spent the weekend putting it together for fun. All in all I enjoyed the challenge of this project, and have ideas about making it into a larger appointment scheduling app one day.

Learnwell Video Suite is a project that allows users to view and upload educational videos to a faux video platform. I used bright colors and lots of animations to get people excited about learning on the landing page. I focused on subjects that I know people love to learn about - space, dinosaurs, and ancient history. This was a fun weekend project, I used iframes for the video player, something I'd used on past projects but hadn't built with in a while. There is also the ability for users to add comments to videos, which update in realtime. Unfortunately, I was connecting to a third party API to save videos and comments, and this API no longer functions.

Stripe Hotel is a personal project that I used to show off my skills to get a new job after leaving Jigsaw XYZ Inc. I wanted to take all of the lessons I'd learned at Jigsaw, over many projects, and bring them together in one project. The goal was to keep everything on one page, and simply show different UI based on state. I would have needed to bring in proper routing and branch out if I'd taken the project any further. But I was happy to acheive what I did in such a short amount of time. I also got to flex my muscles as a designer, as this was one of the first projects since bootcamp that I designed entirely myself. I also challenged myself to integrate with Stripe for this project, which was much less of a challenge than I thought it would be. This project was originally deployed on Heroku, but is not deployed today.

VFZ or "Vengeance for Zul'jin" was my final passion project while in bootcamp. It is a sidescroller ala Mario Brothers built entirely in Javascript, but takes place in the Warcraft universe - one of my favorite game franchises since I was a young boy. This project was a ton of fun, I got it done following a tutorial on youtube that I branched off of several times. I really enjoyed designing levels, sprites, and changing the physics of the classic game. I got to set traps for players, and enjoyed watching them hit walls and figure out how to get around them when I shared the game with my fellow students during our graduation showcase. I also learned a lot, bootcamp had opened my eyes to Javascript, but I learned a lot about ES6 changes using features like arrow functions and Promises for the first time while developing this project.

Persephone was an app I built with a team of 3 others at NYCDA. It was my first time leading a team of developers, as I was elected the leader shortly after our team was put together by our instructor. The goal was to develop an application that could warn people about the dangers of climate change, and give them information on what to do in case of a natural disaster. The aim was to help people - something that still drives me to this day.

Postboy Driving School was one of the many ruby on rails projects that I built while in bootcamp at NYCDA. The driving school and theme were inspired by the greatest filler episode of Dragon Ball Z ever, where Goku and Piccolo learn how to drive. I really got to flex my muscles as a designer on this project, as I felt I really understood Ruby and Rails very well, and challenged myself to build the best looking project I'd built yet. This was one of the projects that really helped me find my voice as a frontend developer, and helped me find my passion for front end development and making spectacular UIs.

My personal pokedex was one of the firssst major projects that I developed while in bootcamp. It involved integrating with an API for the first time, looping through an API response with hundreds of pokemon, and trimming it down to a team of 6. I remember how difficult these concepts were to understand at first, and how great it felt once they finally clicked. To this day I really enjoy consuming data from APIs on a frontend, and feel like a project only truly comes to life once that connection is made. While it's very basic, I'm still very proud of this project. I think it still looks great, and am still happy with many of the design decisions I made. For example - the border around the individual pokemon display is not a border, but just a larger container div. The animations are also still smooth, and I think fit the personalities of the individual pokemon very well.