Portfolio
Examples of my professional and private achievements:
GOV.UK (2016-present)
- I improved the accessibility of so-called Smart Answers (a set of pages which ask a couple of questions to find an answer, basically walking you through a decision tree, written in Ruby on Rails).
- I improved the editing experience, design and accessibility of financial tables in the HTML versions of Budgets.
- I tested components within GOV.UK Elements, a front-end framework and styleguide for government services, for potential barriers and accessibility issues and fixed them.
- I developed setups for personas with access needs, mini training and a testing methodology for them to make accessibility more approachable.
- I develop and provide accessibility training.
- I consult and help other teams make new patterns more accessible.
- I irregularly blog about various accessibility work.
CSS1K (ongoing since 2015)
I adopted the orphaned CSS1K project, a demonstration of what can be accomplished with only 1K of CSS.
I fixed issues with older layouts (mostly CSS), added new functionality (mostly JS) and added tests.
In the first few months of working at Zopa I unified the scattered front-end (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) of their (at the time) 5 different platforms (Ruby, .NET) and made them responsive. This was done iteratively while also redesigning the whole website and making everything more accessible and maintainable. The code base for that evolved into a separate asset repository which gets shared among all the different user-facing websites as a git subtree.
I implemented and maintained a living style guide from the beginning which helped in many ways with: implementing the new code base at first, serving as a cheatsheet to back-end developers, helping redesign the whole website again later, communicating coding style and design consistencies, making prototyping for the UX team easier, and more.
Read about the process of going responsive in more detail on my blog.
- Since the main developer of DokuWiki used to be a colleague of mine, I was helping the project from the very beginning. I am part of the core development team and responsible for the front-end and accessibility issues. Sometimes I design new elements or program little changes or fix bugs (all a mixture of PHP, HTML and CSS). I am quite active in the community as well (mailing list, forum, wiki).
- Since 2005 I developed (or adopted and then further developed) several plugins: ABC plugin, PurpleNumbers plugin, Wrap plugin, IPA plugin, WikipediaSnippet plugin, LoadSkin plugin (adopted), UnformattedCode plugin, FontFace plugin, Editions plugin, Blockquote plugin (adopted), OrgChart plugin, YouTrack plugin (created at and for work)
- And I created a few templates: the new default template (which is part of the core since 2012), Starter template, ACH template, Doogie's template (adopted) and the Writr templates (which was part of an initiative to gain more modern templates by converting existing WordPress themes to DokuWiki templates).
- I was a co-mentor for our two Google Summer of Code projects in 2011 (i.e. I was mentoring the front-end parts): Revisions for media files and Plugin and Template manager enhancement
- All my code contributions to DokuWiki (core, plugins and templates) can best be seen on my GitHub account
- From 2012 to 2014 I worked a few days per year as a consultant for the large and business-critical internal DokuWiki installation of a big UK train operating company
Ignis Timeline (2012, offline now)
I developed the majority of this tool using JavaScript / jQuery, HTML, CSS and PHP / WordPress (although WordPress is not used in the final product). This interactive timeline is fully functional on tablets and was developed within a short amount of time.
This was my first project at Precedent. During only three days, I created all of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP (no CMS involved) for this small microsite. I even managed to sneak in some microformats.
During one weekend I developed semantic, accessible and scalable playing cards with pure CSS and a minimum of markup.
I created a large part of the HTML and CSS and smaller bits of JavaScript for the redesign of our primary care website "Healthcare Republic". As with all our projects the design and wireframe was done by our design team. Within the UI team I worked with and around the ColdFusion code and our in-house CMS.
Developing PressXchange was quite a big challenge for our team. We managed to develop this international website for selling used printing machinery from scratch within half a year. This included the modernisation of our back-end and following Scrum principles for the first time. I was only involved in the first two months of building it. During that time I helped establishing the majority of the HTML and CSS.
For this project (a world-wide search and presentation of fashion labels and shops) we were quite a big development team (about 7 people) during a long time (nearly a year). I did most of the HTML and CSS (following PDF files) and quite a lot front-end and back-end development (in PHP, using CodeIgniter), JavaScript and AJAX (using jQuery). Working with a big team, external designers and web-inexperienced clients (from the fashion industry) proved to be challenging and resulted in several compromises in design and accessibility.
AIA.de (2007, relaunched since I was involved)
For this site for an insurance company I did at least 90% of the HTML and CSS. The graphical design (i.e. PNG files) was done by an external designer we hired for the job. I also did about half of the programming into our in-house CMS (about 20 templates including navigation, teasers, building many complicated forms, site protection mechanism, …) and most of the JS. As we did a lot of the conceptual design, I was involved in that, too. (The site is only in German.)
The graphical design (i.e. PDF files) came from the design agency we were doing the site for. I did all the HTML and CSS and most of the programming into our in-house CMS, using Rhino (server-side JavaScript) and our own formelML.
(The site is only in German.)
GUI for Tonwelt audio guide charging station (2005)
You cannot see our work for this company. We developed and designed the software that fills the audio guides via their charging station which are used in many museums throughout Europe. That was one of the few times when I did also the graphical design of a site or rather the interface design of a GUI (as well as the HTML and CSS).
Die-Praevention.de (2005, offline now)
I was not much involved in the main site (a campaign from the German Federal Ministry of Health). I only programmed "Paul" (the quiz on the right hand side) and the e-cards. But I was greatly involved in the side project "bewegungs.coach.die-praevention.de". The conceptual and graphical design, HTML, CSS and structure came from the agency we were working for. The challenging programming part included (apart from the common registration and login process – with now over 20,000 users) developing mechanisms to let each user enter data, i.e. their daily moves (walking or other sports) together with their duration into forms to evaluate their data automatically into comprehensible charts (tables and graphics). Users can even plan their future activities. This task included a lot of work with the java.util.Calendar class and a MySQL database, apart from the common using of Rhino and formelML and slicing of HTML.
