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Web Portfolio

HTML(+) preprocessor pre is an Open Source project, optimized for the production of extremely fast and highly secure websites. Although its web pages are entirely static, it iterates over database queries to provide fully dynamic content. Whether run from the command line or as part of a Content Management System, it is an elegant solution to the performance, security, and maintenance burdens faced by most small to medium-sized sites.

As primary developer for GuitarTricks.com, the world's largest guitar teaching web site, with over 2 million users and 100 million rows of MySQL data, I engineered significant improvements, including:

I created, from scratch, a complete shopping cart system, including coupons, add-ons, daily specials, inventory control, international shipping support, Braintree payment integration, and full administrative dashboards and controls, that, to-date, has supported over half a million filled baskets.

I upgraded the entire site from a hodge-podge of spaghetti code into a modern paradigm of consistently implemented, object-oriented, MVC-compliant, API-driven, and mobile-responsive pages.

I made the site faster than any of its competitors by a variety of techniques, including optimizing queries, refactoring images into sprites, using a CDN, compressing and concatenating CSS and Javascript files, and delayed file loading.

MEAN seems such a horrible acronym, especially compared with the illuminating LAMP. The svelte powers of node.js and MongoDB arguably deserve better. I began REV-THE-AAH as a MEAN project. The real reason I switched to MERN (React.js instead of Angular.js) is it seemed more forward-looking. Frankly today's js development world is a bit of a Tower of Babel (which even the wonderful transpiler Babel.js does nothing to dispel). Regardless, REV-THE-AAH demonstrates a single-page app communicating with a MERN API. Its technologies include React.js, Moment.js, and GreenSock.js on the client, and, on the server, node.js, Bluebird.js, Express.js, Mongoose.js, Forever.js, and MongoDB. Oh, and it purports to prove the existence (and beauty) of the combined power of all humanity.

The Lincoln High School Alumni Association site was recently upgraded to be mobile-responsive.

KeepItCurrent is the nascent Content Management System used to deliver this page. It utilizes a MarkDown-like syntax to render images, links, enumerated code lines, raw HTML, automatically paired quotations, and automatic transformation of apostrophes and em dashes. It provides SEO-friendly clean URL's. One of its more interesting features (not utilized on this page) is its optional ability to provide static pages. Static pages require no SQL lookups, and thus can be very fast.