In 2023 I worked with a team of developers and designers on the creation of chicagobeyond.org. This is a philanthropic organization that invests in individuals and groups in the Chicago area.
The website was built with a WordPress backend and a Vue + Nuxt frontend. My primary responsibility was the creation of content "blocks" which make it easy for the client to create compelling material for their pages without having to know how to write or style markup.
Because these blocks are dynamic, one of the big challenges was to create flexible styling logic that would make the user-generated content match the intent of our original designs. I very much enjoyed the back-and-forth between the client and design team as we perfected this balance.
INPRNT.com
For about three years I worked as the lead developer on inprnt.com, a popular art marketplace where artists can upload their work and sell it all over the world.
INPRNT handles the production of the physical art — which is created on demand, at time of order — as well the shipping and payment processing. All sale profits are split with the artists, and because the products are created on demand, there is no need to manage inventory.
The codebase is built using Django, and it has a lot of moving parts. There are many API integrations with third-party vendors to handle things like payments, production and shipping.
One of my favorite challenges working on INPRNT was the creation of a test suite for our product mockup images.
When an artist uploads an image file, our system creates many mockup images of the original artwork superimposed on different product mediums (e.g., framed print, poster, sticker).
We wanted to be sure that the generated mockup images exactly match their real-world versions when they came out of production. To do this I created a detailed test suite that could analyze images to catch any discrepancies in cropping, or artifacts on the images.
This tool not only gave us confidence in the mockups that represented our existing product line, but also made it much easier for us to add new product types in the future as the test suite doubles as a useful debugging tool.
mHub Chicago
mHub is a Chicago incubator for hardware-focused startups. In addition to providing physical workspace and prototyping labs, mHub also serves as a valuable networking resource to connect entrepreneurs with talent and capital.
In 2023 I worked with one other developer to create an internal membership directory for members to easily find one another by their specialties. (E.g., easily search members by expertise in plastics manufacturing, 3D printing, Java programming, etc…)
My responsibility for this tool was to create the backend, which I did with a combination of PHP and SQL. I created endpoints that could query the membership quickly, as well as a system that could regularly parse user-submitted data to safely add to our database.
Soundslice Python API library
In July, 2021, I wrote and published the official Python library for Soundslice’s data API. Soundslice is a web app that lets musicians synchronize sheet music with real recordings, and create notation and tablature right in the web browser.
This library makes it possible for our customers to manage their content from Python. You can view the documentation on the Soundslice GitHub here. Installation is as easy as:
pip install soundsliceapi
My personal website
This website was built with Python/Django on the backend and plain ol’ HTML, CSS and Javascript on the frontend. With some resizing, you’ll notice that the design is responsive, and was built with a mobile-first mentality.
I created this website as a final project for an intensive web development course offered by Coursera/The University of Michigan. Below you can find a video where I walk the class through some of the thinking behind my approaches/solutions. Though it’s rudimentary, hopefully you’ll see that I took care to incorporate proper semantics and accessibility standards.
Musician’s blog
I built this website for jazz guitarist Frank Portolese — you can view it live at www.frankportolese.com. It features a blog and gig calendar which are managed by the artist himself using simple admin tools. It uses Python/Django on the backend, and simple HTML, JS and responsive CSS on the frontend.
Frank is a dear friend, mentor and kick-ass guitar player(!)
