DAVID LEAVITT
Ever since I was a boy I have enjoyed art. When as a young man I was introduced to the world of computer art, I instantly attached to it as well. Through work on my own, at school and career experience, I have gained the skills necessary to design ads, banners, product packaging, websites and more. In addition to design skills my experience has given me the ability to design effective user experiences. Throughout my career, I have always tried to help customers define the best experience for their users. As we all know customers don't always listen to our suggestions, preferring to go down their own path. But I have always done my best to make each project's user experience as good as possible no matter what specifications I am forced to work under.
My creativity isn't limited to art and visual design. I have also had the opportunity to think creatively to come up with new ways to accomplish programming tasks. One recent customer needed their site to be extremely customizable. I was able to design a new way to work with the content management system to build their entire site in small pieces that could be easily moved around on the page using a drag and drop administration interface. Not only did we accomplish the goal of making their site customizable, but we did it in a way that was not significantly different from the way we had been implementing sites.
I have spent many years learning how to be a world class web developer. Most of that time has been spent on the job gaining real world experience. At Alpine Innovations, I worked as the Lead Designer for four years. This role helped solidify and develop my skills as a designer using industry tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier and more. I also learned how to manage other workers and ensure things are done in a timly manner. In addition I had the opportunity to use some of my digital media skills to create promotional videos for use in trade shows and on the company website.
Eventually, I moved on to a company called Infogenix. At this company I started as a web designer, however shortly after I was hired, one of their back end developers quit. Knowing from my resume that I had some experience in this area, they offered me the developer position, and I continued in this position for four years. This gave me valuable experience coding in Perl and PHP as well as managing customer database structures with MySQL. This role also allowed me to become familiar with working in a Lenox environment.
Next I went to work for a company called Digital Technology International (DTI). At this company we worked mostly with Newspaper companies. My job in this role was to travel to customers work sites and train them on how to use the company's content management system (CMS). Then we help them with the front end development of their sites. We also help the customers web development teams learn the Caché ObjectScript programming language (A newer language based on MUMPS) which is the language that was used to create the CMS. Eventually this company was bought along with some other companies. I made it through mergers, buyouts and more continuing in the same role as a Implementation Specialist at the newly created Newscycle Solutions. The main difference was that instead of learning and training in one CMS, I have instead had to learn three content management systems. Although I mostly worked on front end development (HTML5 CSS3 JavaScript, Bootstrap, jQuery and more), I was also been called on to program in ObectScript, ASP, PHP and SQL.
More recently I have been working for a importing / fulfillment company called The HB Group. This company has continued to develop my programming skills I have had the opportunity to deeply learn Wordpress, creating themes and plugins to accomplish the uniqe goals of our customers. I have also been able to learn Laravel a popular PHP framwork that enables rapid development. I have also continued to learn new front end javascript libraries such as jQuery and Vue.
I am grateful for the opportunities that I have had in my career so far and look forward to what tomorrow will bring.