Smashing Conf – I had the opportunity to go to the Responsive Design Workshop at Smashing Conf! Two of my coworkers were sent to the actual conference, but since it was close (well, close in relative terms – it involved a train ride and an Uber car to Santa Monica) I was able to go for one of the workshop days. Going to a workshop or conference always gets me really excited about what I do, so I had a great time. I also learned a lot about flexbox and SVG that I quickly set to work actually using in a project that should be launching within the next month. Super excited to share it!
Rachel Nabors CSS Animations workshop – At the end of June (on my birthday!) I did a short 2 hour workshop at my desk at work about CSS animations and transitions. A lot of the transitions related content was review, but all the animation stuff was brand new and it was SUPER AWESOME. I wanted to use the animations on a project I’m working on, but we ended up choosing to use animated gifs instead since those made sense for this particular instance. That said though, I can’t wait to put some of that knowledge to use! I did get to mess around with @keyframes animation a little bit, even though I ultimately didn’t end up using it in my project.
Kwikset Smartcode 915 landing page and email – I put together the landing page and responsive email for this new product. No crazy functionality here or anything – just a simple responsive landing page to help advertise a product. (The demo is pulled over from another page that I didn’t work on.)
Responsive Email Template Package – I spent a bunch of time building out a set of 5(?) different responsive email templates with thorough comments throughout that had different modules that could be cut and paste into different templates and themed to match an appropriate brand.
Web Advanced Newsletter #2 – I built out and sent our second HTML newsletter that we send out to our past and future clients.
Boral America updates – I didn’t build the original site, but did rework the segment landing pages (Brick, Stone, etc) to have a new responsive design.
Documentation – One of the things that I am really passionate about as a front end developer is making sure my websites work in the browsers they need to work in, and having a good process around testing so we don’t have developers handing completely untested code off to another person to test (that’s just kind of disrespectful, don’t you think?). I worked on a first draft of what I consider my official testing plan – how I go about testing websites I’ve worked on, what services I use to test, what services to use to log bugs, etc. I really hope it ends up making the process smoother for everyone and I’m hoping to have the opportunity to test it on a new hire pretty soon.
Canari and shebeest – These two sites actually used the same templates and base CSS but they each have their own color scheme. This was actually the first time I had to do something like this so it was definitely a learning experience in managing one theme for two sites as well as two separate color schemes. It’s also my first bootstrap site! I had literally never used a CSS framework before in my life, so that was a big learning experience. I definitely made some mistakes (some of which were just not doing things the “bootstrap way” and others were just ignoring a feature that bootstrap has because I didn’t realize it existed) but overall I think it was a success.
Oakley SI – I actually started working on this site right after coming back from maternity leave in late 2013/early 2014. We were only scoped to do some of the front end work, so our part was done early/mid 2014. It recently launched (I think in May?) which was really awesome to see!
Zalea updates – I wasn’t the original developer on this project, but I was put on it to do some bug fixes and implement new features. It’s been a good learning experience for me, figuring out how to navigate an Angular app that is more complicated than my book club website. I did some simple bug fixes and also implemented a new feature that works on the front end only to display a free article counter. As you read articles, the counter counts down to zero, at which point the user will need to sign up on the site before being able to read more articles.
In addition to the items I’ve listed, I have a few websites I’ve been working on that are all supposed to launch pretty soon. I can’t wait to share them!