Skill Set
A well rounded programming and maintenance skill set is critical to any web development professional.
Given my past of developing alone, I have had to develop skills for every part of the development, from design, to HTML coding, to server side work, to database construction and management, to server management, to web security.
I am proficient in numerous more systems than listed here, however I will not post on this page unless I have extensive, real world professional experience in a particular system.
If you require a system not listed here, contact me, and I am positive that I can develop competently and professionally in nearly anything you can throw at me.
Language Proficiency
Client Side
- HTML 4.01 (transitional, strict, and frameset)
- XHTML 1.0 (transitional, strict, and frameset)
- JavaScript
- CSS 1, 2, and 3
- XML
- XSL
- AJAX
- JSON
Server Side
- PHP 4.0 to current
- SQL (MySQL is most common, but I can work with anything)
- CGI
- Perl
Server Configurations
I have set up physical servers with custom hardware and configurations for numerous clients, and have an intimate knowledge of even the most intricate internal workings of a server, even down to the machine code (ASM) level.
I have extensive experience with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and I have professional experience with Windows Server 2003.
I am familiar with advanced tasks in server configuration, including Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL configuration.
Physical Optimization
Physical Optimization is a point that high-priced web developers almost always skim over in the pursuit of improving profits.
The art and science of physical optimization is used to make a page as small as possible in file size, so that the website works quickly, even on the slowest dial up connections.
There are numerous other advantages, for example, hosting costs can be reduced by 70% in many cases by reducing the data transfer per user.
Another special point of physical optimization is that higher conversion rates can be acquired by simply having a page load and render as fast as possible.
I have extensive, practical and professional experience in physical optimization. I almost always get even the most complicated layouts to be under 15kb, orders of magnitude less than the average 600kb.
Logical Optimization
Logical optimization is the art and science of making server side applications, such as contact forms and databases run as efficiently as possible.
Generally, these problems are never addressed until it is far too late, and an expensive web server has crashed as a result of too high load.
At the very least, a web server going down, even temporarily, is a critical loss of time.
On the internet, if your website goes down during a big rush, you just lost a big rush, the most valuable thing you can have.
With proper logical optimization, not only can you prevent server down time, but you also get the benefit of a faster website and largely reduced hosting costs.
I have huge amounts of professional experience with logical optimization, and have historically saved businesses, large and small up to 85% on hosting costs when coupled with physical optimization.
Security Skill set
I started my career in web security as a black hat hacker, so there are few on this side of the law that know more about the practicalities of hacking a website or web server.
To this day, I still read all of the black hat hacker blogs, forums, and websites to see what the latest developments are.
Most professional web security companies take a far too structured approach to web security. Any actual hacker will laugh hysterically at these traditional services, as they tend to do nothing to avoid real hackers.
To truly protect a website, you need a hacker. Only a hacker will think like a hacker, act like a hacker, and know the real-world practicum of hacking a website.
My web security skill set has been developed over years of real-world experience, and refined in school and business environments.
In short, if it can be hacked, I can hack it, and I can fix it.