Sarah Harissis' Portfolio Website

This project required development of four faceted searches, of which I coded the logic using only JavaScript and jQuery. I created a set of two controllers to power these searches, and wrote them in a way that made them scalable and reusable for future projects. In addition, the design of the site offered me an opportunity to learn bold new approaches to building sites for Higher Education clients. This was one of our first clients that stressed an importance on ADA Compliance, causing me to rethink approaches to many different components we have built for clients in the past.

This powerful program finder is a multi-faceted, interest-oriented search to help prospective students find the perfect academic program to match their passions and strengths.

I developed all of the filtering logic for this search myself – no JavaScript libraries or frameworks were used except for jQuery. The programming was complex and had many nuances, but the experience gained along the way made it well worth it. This is one of the best examples of my independent, challenge-driven coding style.

Wonders of Wildlife was developed by our team under an incredibly tight timeline. I worked in tandem with my two fellow Front-End developers at BarkleyREI to launch this as quickly as possible while developing the ambitious designs promised to the client. This project is a reflection of my ability to work with other developers effectively and efficiently to achieve a common goal.

The designs for UVA Curry had a number of intricacies that posed styling challenges, which I've always enjoyed solving. In particular, these designs involved coding complex responsive grids and learning how to create and work with animated SVGs. The skills I learned from this have since carried over to the implementation of many other projects.

My responsibiltiy for this project was the static development of the redesigned home page. Much like UVA Engineering's sister site mentioned above, UVA Curry, the designs included some design challenges pertaining to the grid. For example, the mosaic-like news section on the home page required meticulous alignment while preserving the allowance of varying amounts of content. This was difficult to get just right, but was a welcomed challenge and taught me many new tricks with CSS flexbox.

Texas State Aquarium was my first real hands-on experience with WordPress. Although I was somewhat familiar with WordPress from past projects, I was able to delve deeper into the inner workings of this CMS and truly begin to understand how it operates. I learned a great deal about custom theme development and expanded my knowledge of PHP templating.

Explore Minnesota is a long-standing client of BarkleyREI. In 2017, they came to us looking to refresh their website. We usually start all new projects with a fresh codebase, however, Explore Minnesota asked us to work within the existing codebase we had already built for them.

Revamping the site within the constraints of the existing markup and functionality was a challenge, but I was pleased to find this meant I was able to use my design background: time constraints only allowed us to produce designs for a handful of the dozens existing templates, allowing me the creative freedom to fill in the gaps and design as I coded.

Ross University uses Adobe Experience Manager as their content management system, which was brand new to our development team. I developed the static templates while concurrently learning how to integrate them into this new CMS. I had to pick up new skills in a very short amount of time while using unfamiliar platforms and languages, including Java and Sightly. It was a test of my ability to adapt quickly and prime example of my prowess as a versatile developer.

Developing this interactive map was my first dive into both the Google Maps API and browser history navigation support. This inherently made the map quite JavaScript heavy and complex, but challenged me to author clean, organized code while managing functionality between multiple controllers.

For Chemeketa, I was in charge of educating a junior developer who worked side by side with me on static coding. This began with teaching him how to use BarkleyREI's app generator, which is our boilerplate for projects. Using a combination of code reviews and providing direction and advice along the way, I was able to teach him coding standards and practices that were new to him, while working together to complete a full set of static templates.