I'm a builder. Problem solver. Traveler. Photographer. Skier. Native Texan, former Chicagoan, and happy to call myself a Californian. I'm a lover of learning, design, innovation, novel solutions, and keeping it simple.
Roller up of sleeves. Writer of code.
Learn MoreI'm a builder. Problem solver. Traveler. Photographer. Skier. Native Texan, former Chicagoan, and happy to call myself a Californian. I'm a lover of learning, design, innovation, novel solutions, and keeping it simple. Roller up of sleeves. Writer of code.
My arts background has taught me that idealism and pragmatism can exist together, often with great success. I bring this mindset to my work as a developer and I am driven by the desire to build things that bring joy and utility to peoples' lives.
Over the past two years, I have built a solid foundation in programming and web development best practices, with an emphasis on writing clean, maintainable code. My focus now is on diving deeper into several areas of interest, including: the principles of object-oriented design, leveraging proven design patterns, and software architecture best practices.
At the end of the day, though, the thing that drives me is simple: shipping great code!
[How] to think about code, how to balance performance and clarity and scalability and elegance and make smart decisions, how to diagnose problems from limited information, how to form a hypothesis and rigorously test it—these talents elevate a proficient developer to a great one…Shawn has these skills. Combine that with his other strengths and I can't recommend him highly enough.
Paul Duffy, Senior Software Engineer at CareerArc via LinkedIn
Projects
I worked with CareerArc, the industry leader in social recruiting and outplacement services, to help them upgrade their social recruiting platform. A significant amount of my time with them was spent working in Ruby on their backend acquisition engine—one of the core technologies behind the company's social recruiting platform.
I also provided full stack Rails development, helping the company upgrade their social recruiting platform from Rails 3 to Rails 4. In addition to collaborating on the re-architecture of some of the key data models, I was responsible for building out the web-based interface for the company's acquisition engine—a key tool used daily by account managers to monitor and configure clients' acquisition implementations.
An OS X note-taking app for the Markdown-writing, Vim-loving folks out there! Still in development. Not ready for prime time.
Okay, so the name is definitely a little cheeky. But let's set that aside and talk about the motivation for building this app. I'm an active Evernote user and generally I find it to be mostly, usually, kinda pretty alright. Sort of.
betterNOTE solves the two biggest pain points I experience with Evernote by adding support for Vim keybindings and Markdown support. As I said, this project is still in development, but you can head over to Github to check out the repo and follow its progress.
Officiallyshawn.com is my little corner of the internet. The site makes use of Middleman, an awesome tool for building static sites. If you like to party with Ruby/Rails/Sinatra/Padrino, then Middleman will feel very familiar.
With no serious backend concerns to deal with here (my "database" is a YAML file!), I treat Officiallyshawn.com as a playground for diving deeper into front-end technologies I am interested in exploring. In particular, the site makes use of Thoughbot's great open-source SASS libraries (Bourbon, Bitters, Neat, and Refills), and a lot of Flexbox. The code is in a public repo on Github, so feel free to have a look.
OpinioNation was my final project for General Assembly's Web Development Immersive program. It is an online community that connects people who have questions with people who have answers. The mantra of OpinioNation is: "Ask a question. Give an answer. Get involved." The site favors visual, bite-sized, fun, engagement.
The app was built with AngularJS, Ruby on Rails (serving primarily as the API layer), and PostgreSQL.
Fetch, a social network for dogs (and the owners who love them), was conceived at General Assembly during the Web Development Immersive program. Fetch gives dogs (and their owners) the opportunity to connect for doggy play dates.
Fetch was built with AngularJS, Ruby on Rails, and PostgreSQL. Fetch takes advantages of Rails 4's ActionController::Live in combination with Puma web server and Redis to stream one-to-one messages to users in realtime.
WDiPSUM is a simple little ipsum generator filled with inside jokes from the Web Development Immersive class I taught at General Assembly. Teaching a web developer bootcamp involves building LOTS of example CRUD applications to teach students the fundamentals of Rails and web development.
Needless to say, when you're building a blog or a Reddit clone for the 500th time, an ipsum generator comes in handy!