Little Fyr Media

It only takes a Little Fyr

to set the world ablaze

Curriculum Vitae

Profile

A creative, intuitive and innovative User Interface Developer with more than 8 years of success translating client needs and expectations to the design, development, and installation of web based business solutions. Described as an expert with enthusiasm who collaborates on teams and with stakeholders to produce results.

Technical Skills matrix

SkillLevelExperience
(D)HTMLAdvanced/Expert9 years
ECMAScript (JavaScript)Advanced/Expert9 years
XMLAdvanced/Expert7 years
• XSLTAdvanced6 years
• RDF MetadataIntermediate4 years
• XML SchemaIntermediate6 years
• XLinkAdvanced/Expert3 years
CSSAdvanced/Expert9 years
WCAG (Accessibility)Advanced/Expert6 years
FlashIntermediate4 years
• ActionScript 2.0Advanced/Expert4 years
VisualBasicIntermediate2 years
ASPIntermediate2 years
JavaIntermediate7 years
J2EE, JSPIntermediate7 years
Ruby & RailsIntermediate2 years
SQL (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server)Intermediate4 years
Information ArchitectureIntermediate7 years
Document/CMS DesignExpert7 years
Business AnalysisIntermediate2 years

Professional Experience

Central 1 Credit Union, Vancouver, BC 2001 - Feb. 2009 Web Developer

  • Created development guidelines for web developers that ensured consistency.
  • Gathered client business requirements for customizations and refined technical requirements that formed the basis for work activities.
  • Created detailed technical requirements for development teams that ensured project requirements were delivered.
  • Supervised a small team of developers on a project; provided training and guidance.
  • Communicated project status to stakeholders and senior management at meetings.

Capillano College, North Vancouver, BC 2003 Instructor (Part-time)

  • Taught advanced HTML development course for a cohort program.
  • Developed curriculum requirements and course descriptions for revised program.

BlueZone Entertainment, Vancouver, BC 1999 - 2001 Intermediate Developer

  • Created customizations for clients.
  • Developed experimental video delivery product for wireless devices.
  • Defined content requirements for MediaBZ CMS.

Boardwalk Equities, Calgary, AB 1998 - 1999 Developer

  • Developed e-commerce website for online grocer integrated with tenant facing intranet.

Major Projects

MDi Search 2007 Business Analyst/Lead Web Developer

This project improved the search system of MemberDirect Integrated, adding significant ability to provide relevant marketing opportunities. This project involves several partner clients, multiple vendors and mentorship by a senior business analyst.

  • Documented business requirements for approval by Product Manager and clients.
  • Evaluated and shortlisted possible vendors.
  • Created technical requirements for developers.
  • Implemented browser level changes to allow optimized indexing as well as search results.

MDi Web Analytics 2006 - 2007 Lead Web Developer

Product allowed tracking of users and their behaviours on the website and provided information that allowed for the optimization of content. This project involves several partner clients, multiple vendors and an outside consulting company.

  • Performed technical and business analysis during the vendor selection process.
  • Advised on the development of the analytics scorecard.
  • Advised participating clients on the implementation requirements.
  • Designed content management changes to facilitate web analytics tracking.
  • Implemented analytics changes in several sites.

CoastCapitalSavings.com — MDi customization 2005 - 2006 Lead Web Developer

Using the MDi framework, developed the Coast Capital Savings website, reflecting their unique brand and in branch experience on time and within budget.

  • Communicated product features to third party design team.
  • Designed document requirements for content management.
  • Developed custom look and feel based on third party designs.
  • Documented custom design features to allow client to manage future changes.

MemberDirect Integrated (MDi) 2004 - 2005 Lead Web Developer

Collaborated in the development of the flagship product for Credit Union Central of British Columbia. MDi is the first application to fully integrate online banking with a corporate website. Combining a simple templated visual design with a fully customizable framework, MDi addresses the requirements of both small and large credit unions. This contributed to the 18 month sales targets being met within 6 months.

  • Defined vision and technical requirements for customization layer.
  • Defined requirements for information architecture.
  • Created core visual template.
  • Trained web developers.
  • Managed pair of outside developers to create first two customizations.
  • Created tools to facilitate the creation for simple and custom implementations.

MemberConnect 2.0 2002 - 2004 Lead Web Developer

Short lived stepping stone to MDi, MemberConnect 2.0 was a complete redesign of the previous website offering. Combining unparalleled flexibility with complete and rigorous information design, MC2 established many of the architectural elements of MDi.

  • Gathered requirements from all stakeholders.
  • Communicated vision to developers and managers.
  • Designed information architecture system.
  • Developed XML schema.
  • Developed Core design.

Education

Object Oriented Software Technology Diploma, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta

Bachelor of Science — Applied Physics, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta

Why does your site look funny?

There is a good chance that if you're using Internet Explorer of any generation, or FireFox 2 or pretty much any older browser, that this site is going to look very funny. Broken even.

That's because there is an experiment going on here; this site is built using HTML5 markup. In paid professional work, I have to "make it work everywhere" which typically means the lowest common denominator. But this is my place. I can afford to try out different things. I believe that the semantic value of <section>, <article> and <header> tags is huge. The calculation of the header level will be a great boon when including content in many different, and unexpected, in the content hierarchy of a page.

This site is also using the latest CSS specifications where possible. Some browsers do better with that than others. IE6 will probably always be a basket case but with its individual market share at 15% and dropping like a stone, its probably time for you to upgrade to IE7 or try IE8.

I make no apologies for not checking this site against multiple browsers. Tweaking out every browser is a lot of work that I would rather spend writing articles. However, feel free to send be bug reports; I'll get to them as I can

Who and What is Little Fyr?

I am a Web Architect and Little Fyr is where I talk about how to build applications and content sites on the Web. It is also the name I use for giving presentations at user group meetings and conferences. I have more than 8 years of experience developing web sites and applications and I have learned a lot of interesting disciplines along the way. In general, people in our line of work are either visual/UI/grapic designers, back-end system developers (Java, .Net, Ruby), or front end ui developer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). I fall into that group of people who is knowledgeable in all these disciplines and more besides.

Like me, this site is a work in progress. I hope to publish something every two weeks. We shall see.

View Adam van den Hoven's profile on LinkedIn