When I was Freelancing…

Built from scratch using Laravel as a foundation, Established is a film production site that enables users to connect, communicate and collaborate across projects.

The intention is for users to be able to either find work or find crew to work on their projects easily and all in one place.

Bespoke CMS to enable admin users to loginas other users, update and create users, as well as alter text throughout the site.

The frontend consists of bootstrap with jQuery, jQuery UI and Croppie.js. Meanwhile the backend packages include the Spatie MediaLibrary, Stripe Integration, and Campaign Monitor Automation Email service.

My Final Year Project was a great experience that allowed to prove my skills and expand on what I already knew.

The project was setup as a tracking platform, whereby a device tracks an asset, sends its location out, and then end users can see the location on a map. Taking this basic premise into development, the device used was an android mobile phone, as this has all the capabilities that a tracking device would need, along with the costs that were of importance to the project.

To start with, a custom android application was written using Android Studio, which acquired the devices location, and then attempted to send out its location over a UDP server. This message was encrypted using RSA encryption which could be later decrypted by the server and the server only.

The UDP server listening for these messages was written in Node.Js, which after decrypting the message would store the resulting data into a mongoDB database for later use.

A Laravel 5 application was produced which would handle the acquisition of data from the MongoDB store, and presenting the requirements for the users to make use of the data. The authorisation and routing of Laravel made this a great choice, while JavaScript then handled the display of the data on a Google Maps, with current location and past locations being drawn onto the map using the latitude and longitude of the data.

As part of a group we produced a customisable website for a pub out in Gnosall, this has a completely custom backend where the admin can go in and edit images and content throughout the site and have it automatically update it. No need for WordPress or any other prebuilt, this was a completely bespoke system.

Personally, I worked more on the backend of the website rather than the initial front end designs. Alongside backend work I managed the project overall which included helping out the front end team and helping with documentation when necessary.

The backend used another instance of Laravel 5, mixed with MaterializeCss to create a sleek, usable interface for the admin to interact with., The front end of the site used a mix of foundation, slick and jQuery.

Being an active member in the club and pursuing a career in web development, making the website seemed more than appropriate for me to take on.

After waiting for a revamp for a while, I finally managed to find the time to produce this with all the images from members themselves, taken from a variety of shows and events. Finishing University should allow me to join them far more than I have been able to before, including a trip to Ireland in 2017 which I am pretty excited for.

The site uses MaterializeCss which helps with the navigation, alongside being able to make a modern feel easily. Design is not my forte, so using a framework which helped with responsiveness etc. improved both the look and accessibility of the site.

The option of having a go at ASP.NET came up, so I pounced on it to be able to get some hands on experience. Here I built a basic Pizza Shop application where users could add pizzas and additional toppings to a cart, which they would then have to login to order.

The site used the Entity Framework within Visual Studio, which certainly helped with authentication and setting up an array of unit tests for the site. In terms of coding, I used interfaces to handle a local DB connection alongside a faked connection for the unit tests to be able to run.

Furthermore, the experience with a strongly typed language was excellent, and I look forward to using strongly typed languages in the future, be it Java, C#, or even PHP 7.

Having this site hosted anywhere seemed marginally overkill as it would need Windows Server to set it up, and it would only be to display a pizza shop where you don't end up with pizza being delivered to your door!

I have used Node.js with the Twitter API a couple of times now, the most exciting one was for an OVH run Hackathon at Staffs Uni. This was the integration that I took on as part of the team that built the winning project, so that users could enter terms and track them for popularity.

The Hackathon in itself was great fun, it ran from about 9am till 5pm which gave us enough time to produce a front end for users to view the results, alongside push notifications from the browser to a mobile device to keep users up to date.

The code for the Hackathon is still in someone's repository but the code is not live anywhere for the results to be seen.

The Twitter API was reasonably easy to get going as it mostly uses URLS to query and search for designated request. I have used cleaner API's such as the DotMailer API, which in comparison. felt much cleaner to use than the Twitter one.

• Laravel 5.* experienced. Love Composer and Artisan
• Experience with CodeIgniter & Angular.JS (inc Karma.js for unit testing)
• Always encourage the use of a repository for codebases'
• HTML5 Canvas Battleships game
• The site you are looking at now