Per Design

Mostly musings on design

Per Design

2019 Mid-year Updates

—

by

Ben
in

What a busy year – it’s already August! I haven’t posted anything in a long while… So let’s fix that shall we?

Life in general

  • A new bike – I have been able to ride into work this summer – lots of fun and good exercise!
  • The garden is blooming – fresh strawberries, peas, and raspberries make for some fun treats!
  • Serving in a leadership position in my church – an amazing rewarding (and draining) experience.
  • Finally kicked myself into doing a daily exercise routine.
  • Playing D&D again! Soooo fun!
  • My kids like to play D&D! (fun x 10!)
  • Brother got married! I was honored to be best man (and I didn’t roast him much – there was a lot of dust in that room though!)
  • Visited the UK – London, Isle of Wight, Bath, and Dorset coast (Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door). Didn’t get to hit up the Bovington Tank Musuem though. Next time… ?
  • Two-week family vacation trip to Utah for a family reunion. We drove across Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska. With the schedule flexibility (only two points had strict dates/times we had to meet), we got to see and do a lot of cool things. The kids did great. I would do a similar vacation again.

Work

  • Converted a custom .Net/static HTML hybrid site to WordPress. The data migration was intense but everything is running great. Client is really happy with how easy the new site is to update.
  • A web app we built for a client passed client accessibility testing in only two tries! (I’ve heard normally it takes 6-8 tries). I provided the design and accessibility guidance for this app so having us pass in only two tries – not to toot my horn, but awww yeah!
  • That same app was so well received that the client asked for additional modules to be built for it – extending this into an amazing system. Major kudos to our tech leads and developers!
  • With some plugins and a bit of coding on my end, I created a reservation and scheduling system for a conference center on top of WordPress – perhaps my most complex WordPress project to date.
  • Building a much improved MPHI deliverables system with Peter Jantos. Peter added a web service API to an internal business application, which generates a JSON feed that my front-end static deliverables site can consume. This will easily save an estimated 160 man hours (4 people * ~40 hours) a year to prepare and deliver end of fiscal year deliverables.

Conclusion

I had to skip over a lot here but in general, 2019 has been a busy and rewarding year. I hope it’s been good for you!