Bragazzi's

Bragazzi's is a traditional Italian cafe, delicatessen and shop. It's deeply set in its community and has a very particular feel and atmosphere. It needed a marketing website to root their online presence and show their personality. The site needed to update business information based on Google Business Data so the client could keep using the interface he was familiar with. I wanted the website to get the most out of the beautiful photography we had available. Gatsby's Static Image component and its blazing fast serving of static sites were key in delivering this and made it an obvious choice. And if the air pressure is just right, it gets 100 across the board on lighthouse! Yay!

Recipe Costings

Recipe Costings is an app that, wait for it... costs recipes! An internal app for catering / service companies to get their staff involved in the creative process. Employees can create recipes and collaborate with each other using a database of existing stock items. Built with Express using EJS to serve the HTML with the data stored on MongoDB. This was a great way for me to learn RESTful routing techniques and the backend side of the MERN stack.

Workflow

Something I use a lot are task management apps. Making one of my own let me get to grips with connecting a front end with a backend API using the full MERN stack. Building both from scratch and managing data validation and pending server requests really helped me see the kinds of design decisions that become clear when developing full-stack apps. How and where state is stored, calling only the data needed to reduce network usage, and a million other decisions! My other goal was to break away from using bootstrap and try a different CSS framework. Workflow's CSS is built with Bulma and minimal custom styling.

Alexa Christou Photography

Alexa documents her overland travels with beautiful photographs. She needed somewhere to showcase the pictures she takes for her friends, family and anyone else interested in travel and exploration. The focus here is on simplicity, and giving the full stage to the stunning landscapes she captures. Creating a custom WordPress theme enabled me to have the control I wanted over the structure and styling while allowing Alexa to create galleries and manage image uploads herself. I have plans to rebuild this site using Gatsby, graphql and a headless CMS.

Pokemon Type Matcher

A fun little React app that lets you compare the types of two Pokemon and see which one can play a super effective move! Because apparently my emotional growth stopped in 1998. This is something I wish I had back in the day! This was my first experience with React and it clicked with me instantly. I made this app to learn how to build a front end with React to round off the MERN stack.

Marine Venus

Marine Venus is a charter yacht based in the Caribbean. The site is intended to be a brochure site for potential holiday goers. They are then redirected, at multiple points, to the charter company that hires out the yacht. This website is ultimately intended to direct the viewer towards booking on the charter site. A single page layout was the most appropriate way to achieve this.

Natter

Coming soon...

A Twitter clone. I'm currently working on this project to learn the DevOps lifecycle. The goal is to have a fully pipelined CI/CD workflow that takes my Docker containers and implements fully automated build test and deploy to AWS. Using Terraform to implement IAC.