Hello and welcome to my digital portfolio. My name is Nick and I am a freelance web developer with a real passion for Computer Science. If you check my portfolio, you’ll see that I started out with an interest in game development while I was attending college and then shifted my focus to web development. I have a real interest in web development as it enables me to work remotely and pursue many opportunities as a freelancer. I plan to continue to develop my game development skills in my spare time.
My programming experience began when I was in high school, way back in the early 2000’s. I’ve always been into video games (mainly PC games like the original Warcraft games [1-3], DOOM, Blood, Rise of the Triad, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, etc) and I wanted to learn how to create my own game! So I researched what I needed to learn to make that happen. I ended up learning a little bit of C, BASIC, and just enough HTML to create my first craptastic website (sorry, no longer available). I ended up joining the Army at age 19. After almost ten years of service, I decided to use my college benefits to pursue a Computer Science degree. I attended Franklin University’s online Computer Science program in pursuit a Bachelor’s degree. In that time I maintained a 3.98 GPA and a wealth of knowledge.
Within that knowledge I gained important fundamental experience from college. This knowledge helped me to understand how computers really work, this is helpful when going into any type of software development field. Some of the pertinent classes that I’ve taken were: Discrete Mathematics, Database Management, three Java classes that focused on object-oriented concepts, a computer hardware class, Application Server Programming, Network Fundamentals, and Overview of Programming Languages (how programming languages really work [how compilers work, syntax vs. semantics, programming paradigms, stack vs heap memory allocation, etc.]).
After school I worked to expand my web development skills. I read through all of the major W3Schools tutorials to get the fundamentals down (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, MySQL, Bootstrap). Then I discovered how bloated the web stack currently is and that I needed to learn a web app framework. So, I read through the Laravel documentation and did a big project to get my hands dirty on all the major concepts (Pizza Delivery app). As I was working on that project, I wanted to further expand my knowledge and learned frontend framework to build a custom dashboard interface as a single-page application (SPA). To do this, I learned Vue.js and Vue-router for a frontend router in the dashboard. This allows for different sections to have REST-ful URI’s without the need for a page refresh. I also used websockets for real-time updates on incoming orders and for a live order tracker displayed to the customer. After the project was complete, I tackled learning WordPress theme and plugin development for smaller to medium sized jobs. Some jobs are best fulfilled using WordPress and others need something more custom and benefit from the power and versatility of Laravel.
I also did a few small webscraping jobs as I was in the early development stages of the Pizza Delivery app. In doing these webscraping jobs I learned a lot of low-level PHP and web browser automation technologies. Check out the portfolio item for more information.
I currently specialize in developing websites and web applications. I love using my creativity and problem solving skills to build whatever functionality you need. I can build anything from basic brochure-style informational sites, to custom WordPress sites, to full blown web-applications using the mighty Laravel framework. Whatever you need will be fully mobile-responsive to look great on any device. Don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions.
Thanks.