I started working part-time with Brock & Bierk while I was at CBS Radio, and I’ve continued that relationship while employed at Washington University as well. My work is mostly confined to complex pieces of larger projects, as opposed to overseeing a project’s development from beginning to end (although of course there are exceptions).
USSEC
The US Soybean Export Council is a major client that runs a SharePoint team site for invoicing. This client is constantly making new feature requests, and as a result I’ve ended up in a quasi-managerial role in addition to my development role largely because there often isn’t enough time between feature requests for proper project management to take place.
My development work for USSEC is entirely based in functionality, as they simply use SharePoint’s default team site interface for the front-end. The server-side development I’ve done includes an event receiver to change a column value based on a workflow outcome, a custom ribbon action that changes a column value of a selected list item, and a form to add a new folder to a chosen document library and populate its metadata.
I’ve also created several other custom ribbon actions that operate entirely in client-side JavaScript. The goal of these actions is to streamline the workflow creation/approval/rejection process by essentially running a macro that automates actions through several different page loads.
STM Learning, Inc.
STM Learning is an online bookstore that specializes in Scientific, Technical, and Medical educational resources. We built a site for them using the Magento shopping cart platform. Prior to beginning their site development with us, they entered into a relationship with a company called VitalSource to handle their eBooks. Unfortunately that meant we could not use Magento’s built-in eProduct functions and instead had to interface with VitalSource’s API.
I accomplished this by tapping into the functions Magento runs when a purchase is finalized. The code checked through the items in the order, and for each item marked as an eBook it would query the VitalSource API for a purchase code, and then email that code to the user. A relatively straightforward application overall, but it did provide a useful opportunity to familiarize myself with the code behind the Magento purchasing process.
Professional Employment Group
This client needed an interactive map of the US states where each state would display information on hover, and redirect to a state-specific page when clicked. I used these requirements as an opportunity to familiarize myself with the JavaScript canvas.
We purchased a canvas/svg map as a starting point, and I edited the source files to ensure the map would meet our needs. Once that was done, I built the map on a separate HTML page and used an iframe to place it within the Joomla site. This did cause a small problem with the responsive aspect of the site, because the canvas did not behave well responsively, keeping a fixed width regardless of window size.
To combat this, I used a combination of CSS and JavaScript to scale down the canvas and center it in response to the size of the window.