Category: Projects

During the summer of 2024 I had the unique opportunity to take a couple months of my unemployment to engage in a bit of a passion project, which was working as a digital archive assistant, and helping to collect and catalog runaway slave ads from confederate newspapers. In my personal time I have an interest in the history of slavery, and how slavery was defended and how it overlapped with other contemporary factors. Reading through these old confederate newspapers gave me a deeper appreciation for how to handle and care for old documents, it gave me an opportunity to develop my own process for data collection techniques, like batch processing, optimizing data entry, and file sharing. Futher, upon completing the project I was able to make suggestions for potential future improvements.

Lastly, I participated in a podcast episode that you can find here, and I also make a small database of extra files I found in my searches here.

I can’t disclose all my work with Promosis, but broadly speaking I worked with big name companies to produce sweepstakes pages, product registration websites, I developed additional tools and front end visuals to legacy sites, and I worked with Figma to produce wireframes, icons, and designs. I worked primarily in HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP and MySQL. As a full stack developer, I was very comfortable making things look, act, and behave however I needed them to. I gained a lot of confidence in being able to maintain high quality code, keep extensive notes, and communicate issues with my senior developer. Below is a link to the portfolio for Promosis, I can’t specify which projects I worked on, but it will give you an idea about the caliber of the work.

Promosis Portfolio

I worked at Guild Hall in multiple capacities, I was hired on to work on the CEO’s website, and to help him set up the space to eventually be an educational makerspace. In the process I ended up being a teacher, teaching kids the fundamentals of programming, art, design, and engineering. I worked with raspberry pis in python to make a door locking mechanism based on RFID chip readers. I worked on arduinos to teach kids how to build robots and to light up led strips in interesting arrangements. My goal with the website was to build up and design all the necessary pages, and to be able to get the shop up and running. The page has since been updated in different ways that dont reflect my original design, but it still retains a lot of the core design ideas. 

Guild Hall

Helping a Northshore charity reach more people

While still working with the fine folks at Global Children School I reached out to a charity group in the Northshore that I knew through Instagram. I greatly appreciate all the things they do in the area to help people. So I wanted to reach out to them and ask if I could help them design a website. I only had a little bit of time to work with them and was upfront about that. But I wanted to give them a jumping off point. So I set them up with an Elementor based WordPress site because I believed that it would be something that they could learn to use independently and really benefit from. 

I let them know to reach out to me if they ever need any help with the website and I hope they do. I hope I’ll never be too busy to where I can’t spare a little time for a really caring charity. They had a pretty well established brand identity with set colors, so that part was easy. But I did pick out things like fonts, I set them up with some nice branding in the header, and I made sure that they had a page to send people to their donation pages. It was a great experience to work with a group as welcoming and grateful as they were. 

Update: The charity did eventually close down as the students moved on. Site no longer available. 

Solidarity Northshore

An internship turned contract

Starting in December of 2020 I began an internship with Global Children School. It was labeled I believe as a web development and marketing internship. I worked closely with the CEO of the Company, Tatyana Basile to redesign and redevelop her WordPress site. This was my first role out of college and it was definitely a challenge, but I felt more than prepared for it. In the internship I got well acquainted with how WordPress functions. It is initially a bit scary because the interface can be a bit complicated and it was difficult to find where they hid the stylesheet, and at the time I was used to making html files, not embedding html into php files through a text editor which seemed a bit convoluted. And why were there widgets on the screen that looked goofy and out of place? 

Anyway, after toying around with it for a couple months I started to feel like I got a pretty good handle on it. At the same time I was also getting a crash course in Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud and Illustration. I’ve been an artist for years before, but it’s nice to know these tools. I feel pretty comfortable using them, and I created a LOT of digital content including a full brochure for the school, a logo design for a new website yet to be released, a wireframe of that same website, I also made a backdrop for their graduation ceremony, and digital content for the website itself. 

Eventually I made it to the end of the internship period, but Tatyana was nice enough to hire me on contract to work a couple weeks finishing up the implementation of the redesign. It was a hugely helpful experience and I greatly appreciated the opportunity. 

The site has been updated since, but some changes I developed still remain.

Global Children School