Blake Walters — markupboy

Markupboy.com is written and produced by Blake Walters — Interactive developer, markup nerd and standardista hailing from a time when the font tag was acceptable.

My career as I know it started way back in 1995. I designed and built my first website that year… using Microsoft Word. It was awful. Later that same year, though, I had my first paying job as a freelance web-designer - $50 from a local church music group for a website full of frames, tables, and font tags. Of course, I was 12 at the time and didn’t know any better. Now, 15 years later, the fundamentals of what I do haven’t changed and neither has how much I love doing it. Fortunately for me (and for my career), I’ve given up the font tags and tables for CSS and semantic HTML and even picked up a few server-side languages.

Presently my focus is on front-end web development emphasizing standards, accessibility and the end-user experience. I constantly strive for pixel perfect implementations, highly flexible and reusable code and the highest quality craftsmanship for all of my work. ExpressionEngine is my platform of choice for building responsive, scalable, and easily maintainable websites and I turn to Django for building custom web applications.

I currently reside in Boulder, CO and am a happily employed Senior Front-End Developer for Viget Labs as well as a part-time freelance web developer.

Experience

Sr. Front-End Developer, Viget Labs Falls Church, VA, April 2010 - Present

Senior member of Viget Labs recently formed front-end development team. Responsbile for HTML, JavaScript and CSS development and custom ExpressionEngine implementations. Currently working on both desktop and mobile executions for a variety of clients.

Notable project work includes Epic Games’ Unreal Technology site, Rails application BypassLane, SHRM’s We Know Next and Philippe Cousteau’s EarthEcho.

Sr. User Interface Architect, Crispin Porter + Bogusky Boulder, CO, November 2007 - April 2010

Responsible for leading standards-based front-end implementations for a wide variety of static and dynamic websites as well as sustainable web applications. Developed agency-wide architecture for front-end implementations and defined the process by which standards-based user interfaces are implemented. Responsible for interactive department education on my speciality, including intensive technical training for developers, process training for producers and technical consideration training for designers

Notable project work includes CPB Group’s website, the American Express Open Forum, Microsoft’s Windows.com, Burger King’s BK.com and more for clients such as Domino’s Pizza, Volkswagen and Coke Zero.

Sr. Web Developer and Designer, Delta Systems Group Columbia, MO, November 2004 - November 2007

Primary responsibilities include the analysis, design and maintenance of both small and large scale commercial and corporate web sites and web-based applications as well as database design and software development and testing. Also served as web server administrator for over 40 hosted domains across multiple servers. Responsible for all functions of those domains and servers including website, email, database and DNS hosting.

Education

University of Missouri - Columbia Columbia, Missouri, 2001-2005

Received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with a focus in web application development as well as a minor in Mathematics.

Skills

User interface planning, architecture and implementation focusing on web standards and web application development and design.

Coding, Markup & Databases

HTML, CSS, Javascript (including frameworks such as jQuery), ExpressionEngine, Python and Django, PHP, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, MySQL

Expert in the fields of web standards-based development, mobile web development, and front-end web application development.

Programming Proficiencies

Web Standards, Accesibility, MVC Frameworks (including Rails and Django), Content Management Systems (namely ExpressionEngine), and Object Oriented Development.

Internet Systems Administration

Both Unix/Linux and Windows based servers, Apache, Mongrel and IIS webservers, MySQL and PostgreSQL database servers, ExpressionEngine, Ruby on Rails and Django deployment, Subversion (SVN) and Git version tracking