April 04, 2018
Hello! Welcome to my revamped portfolio.
It’s been a long time coming and I’m thrilled to finally be able to share this with the world. I’m also very exicted to finally have a blogging platform to express my views on current technologies and to offer guidance and advice to other developers.
My name is David Saunders and I currently live in New Haven, CT. I moved out here a year ago from Austin, TX.
I started teaching myself web development while working as a Technical Project Manager for Six Red Marbles in Austin. In that position, I was managing teams of international freelance developers and started getting really interested in what they were building. Over the course of a few months, I taught myself enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to land my first professional web development job at Clarity Ventures.
At Clarity, I eventually became the Lead Front End Web Developer, where I was managing both project and personnel teams, as well as developing sites. It was here that I started really getting into JS frameworks, as I had to develop a number of our sites using Angular 1.x.
Prior to moving to CT, I was working as a Front End Web Developer at Monkee-Boy Web Design, Inc. in Austin, TX. I specialized primarily in custom WordPress development, and my day-to-day technology stack consists of HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP.
I currently work as a Front End Developer at Prosek Partners in Fairfield, CT. I was the first development hire in the history of the company, and have been working to modernize the company’s development processes and technologies. In this role, I’ve been responsible for creating the front-end technical stack, integrating our services with the existing design and marketing teams, developing internal web applications and client-facing websites, etc.
My passion lies in JavaScript, however. Over the past several months, I’ve been diving head-first into a number of newer JS frameworks, especially Node.js and React.js. While the learning curve for these technologies is pretty steep, I think the effort is well worth it.
Speaking of React, my portfolio was built using Gatsby, a static site generator built on top of React.js. While I have built smaller side projects using React, I found this portfolio build to be a great opportunity to work on a larger application.
I’m also using Netlify to host the site. Netlify is a great, free hosting platform for static sites. It’s very easy to use and very customizable. Once you sync your GitHub repo to Netlify, anytime you push a commit up to the master branch, your site will deploy. My favorite feature, however, is Netlify’s ability to create secure testing sites from other branches on your repo. For example, you can tell Netlify to create a secure testing environment whenever you push up from your development branch. This allows you see your site on their server before merging and deploying from your site’s master branch.
My goal with this blog is to start writing about the technologies I use and to provide guidance on development best practices. I’m really looking forward to writing more about my experiences using React and Node, as well as my experiences with WordPress and other CMS’s that I’ve used in my daily work.