Is your company looking for a guy like me? I should be your Front End Web Developer. Why? I have bee

Written: October 6, 2016

Is your company looking for a guy like me?
I should be your Front End Web Developer. Why? I have been doing front-end web development for nearly 20 years. The first browser that I used and hand coded HTML for was Netscape .99. I initially started my career sneaking into the UW-Superior lab with a student and teaching myself about the new "World Wide Web." I then landed a series of jobs doing development for DotComs during the boom in the late 90's and early 2000's. Since then, I have worked for more stable companies, including most recently for the State Bar of Wisconsin.
Using web development to solve business problems and streamline processes is my passion. I've done this as an employee in established companies and as a freelancer for clients with big dreams and small wallets. I've come across many different technologies and successfully developed for all of them. But it is my most recent role at the State Bar that will impress anyone who knows something about SharePoint 2010.
Five years ago, the IS director at the State Bar decided that SharePoint would be the best web platform for the organization. He then bought a couple of books for the team and said "Here you go, we launch in 9 months." SharePoint is a fine Intranet product out of the box. However, creating a "pretty" public site with dozens of different content types, web-applications, and government/business-critical database search engines was an EPIC challenge. Over the summer I worked 60 to 80-hour weeks and learned the SP system. Nearly everything in the backend comes to the front as XML data, so I became an XSLT expert and was able to make a number of adjustments. Even so, there were some things I couldn't touch, and a lot of the built-in SharePoint functionality was buried in obfuscated JavaScript libraries. So, to take this system and make it work for our members took roughly 10,000 lines of JQuery and a huge pile of CSS.
If you look at
http://www.wisbar.org/
today, you would never know (without looking at the source) that it was built on SharePoint. I used the traditional SP methods to correct what I could, but then I brought in JQuery and bent the interface to my will.
I am nearly 100% self-taught (that is not hyperbole). I love creating beautiful code and implementing best practices. Unless I am challenged, I am bored - and I hate being bored.
Here I am, ready to work for you.