Technical Skills
I am most comfortable working in back-end Java/SQL and have been teaching myself to use Spring as well (Web, Data, Security, Test).
Backend work is my stronger suit, but my recent projects have all been full-stack, and so I have been learning basic front-end (React.js) and teaching myself how to hook everything up.
Hosting these projects has given me some exposure to the basic AWS services (EC2, S3, Route 53, ACM, Cloudfront).
Other Work
Having spent several years working in luxury goods sales, I have built a range of relevant, transferable skills that supplement my technical ability.
My workdays were spent in a high-pressure environment with multiple overlapping deadlines, and so the first things I had to learn were teamwork and efficient task management. Meeting these deadlines typically involved disruptions that were out of our control, so I learned to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, and to move forward despite unplanned setbacks.
Working with customers made me into an effective communicator. I can filter out information that is not relevant to my audience and focus on what's important.
In short, I can keep a level head in any situation, understand which tasks and deadlines are most crucial, and deliver quality results as a part of any team.
GeoSave
GeoSave is a project I built to accompany the browser game GeoGuessr. It allows users to save and organize collections of Google Maps StreetView locations. Locations can be created, updated, deleted, and filtered. Users can choose to include them in one or more lists either when creating the location, or at any time after. Viewing a saved location displays an actual image pulled from the Google Maps Static Street View API.
On the technical side, GeoSave is backed by a Spring Boot application and a MySQL database which live together on an EC2. Connections to this EC2 are routed via Route53 and secured by a LetsEncrypt certificate covering api.geosave.org.
The front-end is a React.js application written in TypeScript and styled by Bootstrap. Aside from Bootstrap, Axios, and some FontAwesome icons, no other third-party libraries were used. The webpage lives in an S3 bucket, is delivered by Cloudfront, and secured by an ACM certificate.
Most of the features of the application require users to be logged in. The user authentication involves issuing a JWT to each user who succesfully logs in, then including this JWT with each authenticated request. The Spring application keeps a cache of all currently logged in users and grants access to protected API endpoints based on this JWT. This is also used to ensure users cannot modifiy or delete any database records they do not own.
If you are interested, a demo account with some preloaded data has been prepared and can be accessed with username and password of "demo".
Neo4j Data Presented With React.js
The element below is managed by React.
A RESTful API built with Spring is sitting on an AWS EC2 instance and hooked up to a Neo4j graphical database. The database holds a large sea of nodes (foods, in this case) which are linked to each other (indicating which foods pair well).
Typing a valid food into the field below triggers a GET request which returns the related foods for React to display on the fly. To avoid unnecessary requests, a list of all foods is fetched upon pageload, and GET requests are only fired off if the field input matches a valid food.
This page is presented to you via AWS Cloudfront and secured via an ACM certificate. The data coming from the EC2 is secured via a LetsEncrypt certificate.