I now work at Sitepen as a Software Engineer. This role puts me back in front of clients, and provides broad opportunities to further develop my skills, and work alongside a world-class lineup of experts in the ajax and web-UI field.

I've focussed a lot of my efforts on Ajax - delivering usable and responsive user-interfaces with web browser technology. i have experience working with most of the major javascript toolkits, and in particular the Dojo Toolkit - where I'm an occasional contributor and active community member. I've keep current on HTML/CSS, online accessibility, and continue to expand on my useful smatterings of a host of serverside platforms, technologies and associated languages.

Updates and Pointers

Case Studies

Friday, July 21, 2006

I added a new case study on a healthcare-related visit/record search interface I worked on last year. It involved a custom Vignette Portal Theme and Grid, as well as some markup/css/js (using the dojo toolkit) that I was quite happy with.

Some of My Tools

I recently made the switch to OSX (Leopard), but use VMWare Fusion ease the transition and provide me with a Windows environment and those tools I cant live without

Ajax Development

Most of the average day, I'm in Textmate, Firefox/Firebug, Beyond Compare, various Internet Explorers and other browsers

Graphics Production

I mostly use Adobe's Creative Suite (esp. Photoshop). Did you know BeyondCompare can do visual image diffs?

Perl/etc

While perl has all but disappeared from view on the web, it still rules when it comes to scripting away tedious and/or daunting tasks to free up your day to do what you were really supposed to be doing.

I've also recently been using the javascript with the Rhino engine in the same kind of way

Productivity

In addition to the scripting, another stand-out tool for me is Beyond Compare - which has gone from being a handy utility to a essential tool in my toolbox. I use it daily, constantly to compare files, merge in template changes, manage development - staging - production servers, and on and on.

XML

I've tried a few tools, but fall back to Perl's libxml bindings, occassionally firing up XML Spy for validation, xpath testing and quick xslt transformations during development.

The latest from the "Builder" blog Web and similar work related links, notes.

 

Work-related del.icio.us posts