John Harman Programmer and digital consultant

I can't actually say much about this project right now as it is still in development due to the client changing their mind on how the site would function. However I can say that it was a showcase site providing information and interaction to keep the user interested as they went through the site. The site was created with touch screen devices in mind so we could use the native features on the device to give the user the best experience possible. I can show this when meeting in person if interested.

During my last month with Avvio a new Head of Digital started to replace the old Technical Lead. I was heavily involved in getting him up to speed on processes as well as having many talks about the structure of development at Avvio and what could be done to improve it based on our shared experiences.

Channel 4's Paralympic website was already up, however a new design along with new features was already well under development. My main role was to help them ensure an ontime and smooth delivery. This entailed learning and using their in-house CMS which is specifically designed for sporting events. I wouldn't say that the role was technically challenging but I did have to learn a lot very quickly to get everything rolling. The sort of work I was doing was:

• Creating web pages and includes using XML and XSLT.
• Working with Channel 4's accessibility agency to ensure the site was accessible to at least AA standard, this also entailed using screenreaders such as JAWS for testing.
• Enhancing clunky features, an example would be the schedule which I managed to fixed the headers to make everything more visible while still being accessible.
• Ensuring the website HTML validated as much as possible, there were some scenarios that this was not possible due to accessibility features actually breaking full validation.
• Generally discussing usability issues with the team to see what we could do to make it a better experience for the user.

British Gas are the main sponsors of the GB Swimming team and wanted to spread the word internally about who the team is while trying to get them excited about their part in the Olympics. British Gas have touchscreen pods at most of their locations around UK, these were updated with three different swimming oriented games and information on the team. When a user completed the game they had the chance to enter for a prize draw afterwards. The system ran within Chrome Kiosk mode which meant we could use the latest HTML5 and Javascript features to create the best experience possible. The project itself only had two and a half weeks until deadline which we met with almost half a day spare.

• Swimming game: three.js was used to create a 3D-esq retro style game where users had to dodge randomly dropped obstacles that became more frequent as time moved on.
• Snap: three.js was used to create a simple snap game where the swimming team would be used on the cards that the users had to match.
• Create an avatar: Users could create their own swimming avatar by dragging different clothing and accessories onto the model. A screenshot was then taken of the user's avatar with Canvas and stored locally on the machine for later retrieval.
• About the team: Users could watch video on each of the four main swimming hopefuls in the GB team

The LMS was created so that Canon could easily train their partner companies' staff. The staff to be trained could be located anywhere within the UK and the machines they would be learning on were mostly going to be slow with bad resolutions. My role in the project included the following responsibilities:

• Reading and maintaining the specification document, ensuring that it describes all functionality required by the system.
• Discussing technologies to be used with the technical director at dreamm and creating the project using them.
• Ensuring that all involved in the project were up to date with its current status and making sure that deadlines were going to be met.
• Liaising with other companies to ensure SSO integration with partner companies was successful.
• Deliver the product to testing and complete all bug fixes.

This tool is an internal site which helps staff create goals for their career progression. It does this by allowing them to create and review goals on a quarterly basis, this review process is done remotely with the manager via the site. I was asked to create the backend administration for the tool so that dreamm could administer the options available.

The new dreamm website had been in the pipeline for some time but no-one ever had time to complete it. So I was tasked with creating their new site in three days. The website was very simple in structure and layout, which made the task achievable. However the site is still not live due to the guys at dreamm still being too busy with client work to finalise content and launch it. Watch this space.

Historically the intranet, mobile intranet and extranet are three different websites. The intranet is managed by the Internal Communications team for staff that worked on site at Sky or over a VPN and was created by Avvio. The extranet was managed by the Supply Chain for engineers out in the field so that they could get the latest news, it was also created by Avvio. The mobile intranet was managed by Internal Communications but created by Sky's internal mobile team. It allowed staff that had a windows BSKYB login to access the intranet content while they were outside the network on their mobile, tablet or desktop.

In an internal re-shuffle Supply Chain became part of Internal Communications, this created the opportunity to streamline the communications process to all staff of Sky as well as opening the possibility to enabling comments and likes to anyone that was able to view the content on either website. The main tasks of the brief were:

• Allow content to be published via the intranet CMS onto individual or all three sites. Including being able to only show to particular sub user groups in each site if necessary.
• Can handle sharing of images and videos that are used in the article.
• Should be resilliant enough to handle connection down time and continue as usual.
• Any comments or likes made from either site would be available on all others almost immediately.
• The site was to be moved onto a new environment which included two load balanced web servers and a clustered SQL server.

I was involved in all meetings once the project was started, often going into Sky to speak with the clients, who I have always had a good relationship with due to working with them for 3 years previously. After the initial development and testing period I worked at Sky HQ to ensure that the code was functioning correctly and performing satisfactorily. This meant I worked with Sky's CADM team and their performance testing team over a two week period until all were satisfied.

The above is only a synopsis of the main work that occurred on this phase of the project, there is more but we can discuss that in person. The project was delivered on time and is in production as we speak.

My brief was to create a simple and extendable frontend engine that would allow designers with frontend knowledge to develop eLearning content that would work on all desktop browsers (including IE6) and iPads. The system needed to allow designers to create their own functionality and interactions while giving them the basics of simple page transitions.

The second phase of the engine was to create a tool that would be used to speed up content creation by helping the user create / edit content directly in the browser. I came into this project after the initial editing tool was created and helped to improve it by adding more functionality. This helped to create a system that could be used as it was or one that could be easily be extended for any requirements. I was then working on any bugs while the tool was used on its first project.

ASP.NET MVC 3 was used as the backend to manage screens and save changes to disk, other features were added including the ability to see the difference between two saved versions of the same screen.

A study planner was created for CEM which helps students to plan their weekly study plan. Students would go through a step by step guide asking for input of study points required and their commitments such as work, leisure, sleep. Once all steps had been completed the user was informed if they had enough study time booked in or if it need to be adjusted. If the study time was correct it then analyzed their plan and if necessary would suggest other tips to help them, e.g. splitting up study blocks if study sessions were too long.

During the transition from Senior Developer to Head of Digital I was made line manager for the rest of the team, including two digital designers and our two developers (one being a contractor until my old role was filled). At first it was tricky, because I would say my team were my friends more so than my colleagues. Naturally, I wondered how I would balance my new duties and responsibilities with those friendships. I think my approach has worked, I made sure that I was available whenever they needed to talk about anything, professional or personal. I also tried not to pull weight over them unless necessary, meaning that I discussed issues with them in such a way that they would reach their own conclusions. On top of that I tried to encourage their good work with verbal and written thanks as well as doing things like taking the team out to lunch to show them our appreciation.

On the side of managing the team and settling into a new role I had to recruit for my old position of senior developer. I worked closely with the Studio Resource Manager to make sure we found someone that had the necessary skills, mentality, personality and drive. In fact, their personality and mentality were almost more important than their skills, as we needed someone that would knock down barriers rather than put them up.

Being the Head of Digital meant that I had to be more client-facing than I had been previously. It was critical that I was at meetings with Account Directors or Senior Account Handlers to impress clients with Avvio's technical knowledge and understanding of the user's experience. As a result of this, during my time as Head of Digital I was involved in pitches and many other general meetings that lead to us gaining new clients and winning more work.

Additionally, as part of this role I would also try to build up a relationship with their internal technical teams. I found this made a massive difference in ease of delivery for the project and I would recommend it for any third-party.

An on-going job was to ensure that digital was aligned with the business' needs and direction. This meant regular meetings with other heads within the business to ensure that we were all agreed on what offering we could give to clients. This then lead to thinking about the skills we had in the team and any additional resources we had available i.e. freelancers in specific fields I could then make sure that any possible jobs that came in could be dealt with in confidence, from pitch through to delivery.

While I've been at Avvio I've worked on many projects, including: emails, micro-sites, intranets, distributed scheduling tools and our own internal libraries such as a search tool.

During these projects I've taught myself all of the libraries found below and have used techniques that I have read about in books, online or by going to Developer Developer Developer and finding out about the latest new technology. The things that have excited me the most over the last two years have been Inversion of Control, NHibernate and Lucene.NET, not to mention a few things recently that I haven't had a chance to use at work but I have tinkered with, including: NodeJS, KnockoutJS, Razor view engine and OpenWrap.

While working on Sky's intranet I used many different skills and abilities. Some out of necessity and some through a natural learning curve.

1. The site was hosted internally at Sky, so as a third-party we only had access to one of their testing servers. Originally only being deployed via a zip file, the deployment process was improved over time by creating simple to use installers.
2. I was often contacted directly by the client, either to discuss new features / ideas that he may have. If a bug appears on the site, he will often speak to me directly so that we can resolve the issue as quickly as possible for him.
3. Working with Sky's internal development team use to be a difficult experience. We improved this relationship by involving them as early on as possible in the update process, including them in testing and asking their opinions on functionality. We also made strides to build a more personal relationship between the two teams by bringing them together over lunch to discuss the project and other aspects of our work.
4. Sky's intranet was created using a, no longer supported, code generation template for data access, a no longer supported. I decided that the best approach to take on the site's continued development and evolution without a re-write was to start using NHibernate for new features and to gradually move across the old features as necessary.
5. Some features, such as integration into other systems internally, would have been tricky for us to implement. Instead, we created container areas so that Sky's development team could plugin their own features to enhance the site.

Avvio use a model whereby the core digital team is small but is bolstered by contractors for additional man power or specialist skills when required. This means that we couldn't always use the very latest technology because finding contractors last minute that could do those skills was either very difficult or very costly.

I would say the biggest technical changes I made at Avvio were; moving from SourceSafe to Subversion, .NET framework 2.0 to 3.5, and starting to work on a new set of libraries to help speed up development of features that were created time and time again. I also setup CI for less friction during the development lifecycle, this also had the bonus that contractors didn't need to be shown how to deploy to our test servers.

Avvio use two server environments, testing and live. I was responsible for both environments and had to decide:

• What specifications are required to serve each environment
• what should be installed
• what conventions should be followed, e.g. website and structure
• FTP setup - including management of users and access
• ensuring security is strong enough so that our client's data is safe

I was asked to come in and give a day's tuition to two full time developers who were due to start building the booking system mentioned above. I was asked to teach them the basics of ASP.NET and go through solutions to simple scenarios that they frequently came up against.

I tried to teach what I considered to be best practices when programming in ASP.NET using OOP. However, it was quickly evident that they had not touched upon OOP before and that they had a lot to learn. To aid their learning I created a very small example application that they could refer to during their development.

After giving the day's training course I was asked to come on as part of the team to help start build their new booking system. The system had already been planned by the development manager, but not to a huge amount of detail. As a result, we frequently had to use our own common sense because we were often mapping loose ideas to the way that pages from an older system had worked.

If I was to work on this contract again I would get the team to review each other's code far more often. This did happen, but only really when helping each other. If it was made part of the daily cycle the quality of the code would have been better and knowledge of the system would have been shared more evenly.

I was brought in originally to tidy up the CSS that had become a mess and was misbehaving in various different browsers but mostly IE6. I fixed all of the layout issues of the site and also tidied up the use of HTML, which was semantically very wrong in a few places, e.g. strong being used as header tags. I did it far quicker than expected and quickly moved onto other tasks that needed doing, such as fixing bugs on already existing administrative pages, creating new features such as an audit trail, and adding polls to the site

Simon Harriyott (contractor) and I were given the task of creating the website from scratch. We we're given the brief, page designs and part of the database structure. We then had to work through the rest of the project, including; project task management, completing the database structure, backend programming in C#, front end HTML / CSS / JavaScript, self-testing and working with the QA department before the final deployment.

This site is still mostly as it was when it was created. This website is now three years old and the techniques that I used at the time show. If I was to do it now I would want to output much cleaner HTML using some MVC framework and I would use Lucene.NET to create the search feature.

I worked closely with Laina, the owner of The Fine Art Company, to plan the site. We had to make sure that we had both the user's needs and the administrator's needs were met. Laina then used our plan and objectives to come up with designs, these designs were then tweaked to take on board some best practice advice from myself.

I then got to work on the site, building it using ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. It was not built on top of any already existing e-Commerce site because I thought that her needs were too bespoke to try shoehorning into the way another e-Commerce site worked. However, if I'm honest, I always used to think that a bespoke build was the best solution, but now I think that isn't always the case. There are so many different options available, either as a bought product or open source, that it's fairly likely one of those options will fit the needs of the client, which in the long run will save time and money.

I built the site using progressive enhancements so that the site was as accessible as possible. I had to integrate the site into Mal's eCommerce for the payment gateway because the client decided that they wanted to continue to using it, as it had worked so well for them previously. The site was delivered within the deadline of 1.5 months and has had a few updates since. I'm proud to say that there have been zero front end updates and as far as I know everything still renders well in all browsers.

I originally designed various websites, emails and basic banners. Eventually I was given the opportunity to design the main Friday-Ad website. Although designing is not my main skill, I still believe I have a good eye for design.

Although Friday-Ad owns a lot of different websites, their busiest site was www.friday-ad.co.uk. One of the main reasons for this was because of the amount of content on it and that the fact that this content was easily found through search engines. SEO changes that were put into place by myself and our SEO consultants were the reason for this. My part in this process was to plan and update the website so that search engines could index the different categories and results for specific areas, therefore targeting local content. This system worked so well that it was only replaced in 2010.