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Welcome

Hello all, at this time I would like to think you for taking time out of your day to visit my site. Have a look around and tell me what you think.In case you wanted to know, let me introduce myself. My name is Loveson Joseph, but I usually go by LJ. I graduated from UCF with a degree in Information Technology and a minor in digital media. I have learned many things in development so please allow me to tell you my story.

My back story in development started in high school. I always wanted to know what makes things tick. So when I got my first computer I knew everything about the hardware and how it all fit together. My next and only thing to do was to try to understand what website were composed of since they used the computer to display information and more. I soon learned a enough to get hooked on creating sites. The sky was the limit even with the basic knowledge of html and css. Even today there is always and repeat always more information for me to learn. That started the spark to make me want to be a web developer today. After high school it was time for me to decide a major for college. I took the route of information technology but in end I was a developer at heart. In college to further enhance my skills I took on jobs where I would learn more about development. This was mostly through shadowing others in the profession. The jobs I took on at UCF was a web designer position with the engineering department and the other a web designer position with a full time web developer and web designer. While working these jobs I learned that there was a lot more to what I knew and that I needed to get better.

At UCF I worked with research students as an intern. The lab consisted of 3 students and professor. I of course could no do what they did but what I could do was learn what they were doing and display it for them on a website. This was my first website that I created in which I had to do personal research on html and css. The site needed pages of information, images of the project as well the students and the lab. Dreamweaver was the first thing I had to learn how to use. I used notepad when I first learned how to make a webpage. Of course now I would use notepad++ or even atom for my IDE. I Learned to make my own stylesheets instead of inline styles as well as make sure the html and css are valid. The homepage needed a slider for the image so I had to understand how javascript worked. This all was a eye opener and in the end the site worked out.

After the web job with the engineering department I worked at SDES IT as a junior web developer. It was a work study position where I would work part time helping a full time developer and designer. This department had many different sites they were responsible for. I worked mostly with the designer and picked up knowledge from him that I use in my current work. The sites were all PHP with a Microsoft server on the backend for the data. This was my first time working with a database as well as dynamic server executed code. Concurrently I was taking classes on databases and php. This would be more difficult if I wasnt but in the end I was able to be well versed in html, css, javascript, PHP, and SQL.

After I graduate with my bachelors in information technology and a minor in digital media I begin to look for full time work. My first job was with a travel agency company bookit.com as mid-level web developer. I obtained many skills at bookit as what I would expect in a professional environment with professionals. To work here you need to know PHP since it was the main language used here. The frontend displayed the view using view models and a template language called mustache. The frontend was styled using bootstrap and a frontend library called bootstrap. Model-View-Controller was something I was not familiar with in college until now. Version control was also another thing I would now and forever use as a professional for my multiple code pushes. We started out using svn but then switched over to git. The code cycle was also something new to me that I had to get use to. Our teams would have scrum leaders and we completed two week sprints. After a while we changed to kanban in which you picked up a ticket and worked on it after you finished your first ticket. At bookit I created my first mobile web application for logging using react native. This project was for a proof of concept to create our own in house application for ios and android.

I soon left bookit for ventures at another company called listing power tools or lpt. This company is a marketing company for realtor's to get their name out on the street for house selling. There were many websites to this company from angular, to PHP, to just plan jquery websites. All the sites spoke to a mySQL database. At this location I used more up to date technologies as well as more build processes. We used NPM to install the packages we need for the site to run. Bower for our frontend dependencies. Grunt we used to compile our sass files for the frontend. AWS is where we deployed our code to for testing by our QA. Our code was testing using ghostinspector as well as circle ci.

Each day I am learning more and more about web development. I hope to be a source of information for others who are just now starting their journey, and to others who are still learning.

L.J.