Andrew Steele

Rezli brought me in to help them get down the last mile in the front-end as they were readying version 1.0 of their social networking app. I worked closely with their designer to determine how the UX of their product should look and feel for their users.

The original version of their app was created for them by contractors who chose to use React.js everywhere. The core development team and I were less-than-familiar with React development so part of the work I did was to convert some of the JSX templates to HTML/Slim templates and taking the JavaScript components out of the React framework and recreating them in pure JavaScript and/or jQuery. In other places of the app, I had to add new functionality and content using React—giving me valuable insight as to when React and event-driven frameworks like it are useful and when they're not.

One of Firma 8's earliest products was a social network with a global audience, and we wanted a way for them to be able to talk to each other. Using the then-new Google Translate API, I was able to create a prototype of a near real-time website translator with an intelligent search-and-replace capability. This grew into a full business—allowing us to translate content for Fortune 500 companies while preserving their branding and industry-specific terminology.

Once Firma 8 transitioned into offering translation services, we determined that document translation was going to be a necessary product as well. I first examined Microsoft Word's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, since I knew it would be easier to manipulate well-structured data.

What I didn't anticipate was how much formatting was included in the middle of the text. This required creating algorithms which could extract the text in-full for translation and then remember where to re-insert the content so as to preserve as much formatting as possible. For the non-XML, older version of Word, I used a SOAP-based conversion service to convert documents into OOXML prior to translating.

Navigate My Campaign wanted to become the one-stop shop for local politicians looking to launch and manage their campaigns for election all in one place. A big aspect of the product was having a unified platform where they could create and manage their website along with matching flyers, letterhead, and business cards.

I created the website generator and print materials generators using Ruby on Rails and Prawn (a PDF creator), and adapted and created the custom templates used by the generator. Each website also integrated with Facebook Pages and Twitter via API—allowing politicians to post in one place and have it automatically show up on their website too—negating the need for a full CMS and lowering the barrier to entry for non-technical candidates.

This is the primary controller within an Ember application that I developed. Its core functionality involves conducting sentiment analysis on a user's tweets to determine whether their overall sentiment leans towards positivity or negativity.

I helped Firma 8 create a service where customers could upload videos that they wished to host online and get back a highly-optimized, web-ready file or embed code. The process and technology we employed were so unique, it was awarded a patent from the USPTO (Pat. No. 9,565,430). I created the front-end web-based interface for the service, as well as offering consulting services for implementation of the back-end of the service.

My personal portfolio website.