I had a feeling it wasn’t good when Mark, the president of the company, and Garry, my immediate boss asked to see me last Thursday. The company needed to cut back, and I was out of a job effective Friday. They stressed that it was nothing that I’d done, and that I was leaving on good terms. I asked if I could use them as references, and they enthusiastically agreed. (Mark, in fact, just posted several endorsements on my LinkedIn profile.)

So, where does that leave me? Looking for a job.

I’ve been a web developer for 14 years, writing HTML, CSS and Javascript by hand. I know how to create highly faithful working web pages from Photoshop mockups. I know how to debug cross browser issues. I dealt with Netscape 4 and IE 6. Current browsers are a piece of cake in comparison.

I also have server side experience, using ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL server. Most of that work was in service of our content management and e-commerce platforms, pureEditor and pureCommerce. I wrote a lot of the administrative code for both systems, and along the way, developed a few really neat user interface widgets, implemented in object orientated JavaScript, HTML and ColdFusion:

• A combination file selector select box plus file uploader
• A file search plus file uploader widget, for use when dealing with larger quantities of files
• A “multi-view” page, enabling the administrator to tab between editing a main item, and listing or editing associated items. For example, a page where an admin could edit a course, list students assigned to the course, and edit the student/course assignments.
• “Search/select” functionality, where the user needs only enter a few letters to search on, causing applicable choices to be populated into an associated select box.
• A really nice AJAX driven tabbed editor, for administering complex objects like web site records. The tabbing affords organization of the records, and the supporting script loads each section of the form as needed, adds event handlers on load, makes sure the form submission stays in the overlaid editor (rather than going to a new page) , can load external scripts on the fly, and facilitates all sorts of other interaction. I’m really proud of that one.

All of the e-commerce and content management sites have their own custom appearance, implemented via “themes”. I did all the theme development work, starting from HTML prototypes of the designer’s Photoshop mockups to actual integration with the supporting ColdFusion systems.

More recently, for the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, I’ve built a couple of generations of the Bureau site, (the last two versions in HTML 5) built user interface pieces to enable users to see their site scan results, and gotten my feet wet in Python, building several parts of the testing code that assesses pages for accessibility problems. As we started scanning sites, and started generating huge volumes of results (some sites are not well built) I learned how to create imports capable of handling large volumes of data in a reasonable period of time, without taking down the server.

In addition, before becoming a web developer, I spent years in retail. I know how to deal with customers, and I know how to support the people who deal with customers. I know how to document things, and how to explain things to non-technical users.

I’ve learned a lot in 14 years. If you can use my experience, see my resume, or get in touch via resume at tedohara dot net. Or leave a reply here. I see all responses.