Arizona Game and Fish Facts
Informative website used to inform the general public about how hunting and fishing helps the wildlife ecosystem.
Having worked on Arizona Game and Fish Facts website in early 2016, the design has changed but there is an archived version of what I worked.
The majority of this project was focused on modern web technologies like responsive design, fluid grid systems, and CSS3 transition animations. Main takeaways from this website was working off a design predefined on a PSD and building a site that scaled well from mobile all the way up to the largest desktop screens. Additionally, debugging these transitions for browsers that deviate from the standard, like Internet Explorer.
Although the website was heavily focused the front-end, there were a few features on the back-end that I worked on. The only information the database was used for was storing user emails for the clients newsletter. On the initial implementation, I notice there were a significant amount of invalid emails, causing the account manager for this client to have to filter the data for valid emails. To fix this issue, I ended up working on validation for both the front-end and the back-end to prevent invalid email being stored to the database.
LighthousePE
Mobile proximity marketing platform that delivers targeted content, based on the user's behavior.
Little River Casino Resort
Company website used to inform users about their casino and hotel. Also advertise events and dining around the casino resort.
Visit Arizona
Vacation website used to bring more people to the state of Arizona.
One of the largest sites I worked on at Off Madison Ave where I was the main back-end engineer. The role on this team was to build RESTful APIs that scaled to the traffic needs of a tourism site. The most involved API was search for events, businesses, cities, and articles. They all had different requirements, but similar components like grouped categories, keyword search, date range, or location.
Implementing these search where first separated by the data types I was searching, but quickly move to general functionality that was broke into small, modular piece that I could composed together based on needs in the search API. Building this help me understand the complexity of multi-filtered search and keep database queries to a minimum, all the while caching results to keep response times down.
Another part of the site we needed to keep, that was on the previous version of the site, was a legacy marketing platform called LINCS. The main issue with keeping this platform running way the cost of licensing software we were using along with the data servers we had provisioned -- that being around $5,000 monthly. Luckily, the Arizona Office of Tourism team were using a limited subset of features, which allow us to create a plan for creating a "life raft". This new software service would significantly reduce the cost of maintenance, while preserving the feature of targeted email for users that signed up for the newsletter and the physical or digital travel guides.
I had to plan out my strategy for moving the old data from Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL, including the changes in table schemas using modern relational database features. After data normalization, I had to build out the APIs that could be used to create, read, update, and delete entries being managed by this service and stored into the database. These APIs include validation to ensure the validity of the data, but give the API a better user response of what data fields are required and what types they need to be.
The last two components of this "life raft" was the email scheduler for entries that selected points of interests in their travel guide and reports for the emails being sent. Building these components help me gain the experience with relational databases for features like views that structure that data based on an area of interest, and data aggregation for email actions like sent, read, click-through rate, etc.