Curriculum Vitae « Matt's Hidden Corner

Curriculum Vitae

Personal Details

Name: Matthew Bailey

Current Locale: Newport,Isle of Wight, United kingdom

Email: nexgen.matt@gmail.com

Daytime telephone: 07532057447

Evening telephone: 01983 527084

D.O.B: 09/05/1969

Martial Status: Married with two children (11 & 14 years)

Background

Born and raised on the Isle of Wight I attended Cowes High School before leaving in 1985 at 16 years of age with a couple of GCE’s and a handful of CSE’s and little idea of which direction to take.

Between the ages of 16 and 18 I embarked on an apprenticeship in Toolmaking. This was followed by period working as a GRP Laminator . Frustrated by a further 4 years working in different production line environments I entered into working in the care sector.

During the 5 years that I worked in the care sector I gained wide experience in working and communicating with clients suffering with mental health issues and learning difficulties.

Duties included planning and implementing care plans in consultation with parents and other agencies.

Much of the work I carried out was with clients who displayed ‘Challenging behaviour’ and I received a broad training in the control and management of aggression and alternative methods of communication.

In 1998 just prior to the birth of my second child I was required to give up work to act as carer for my disabled wife and two children. I have continued in many ways to fulfil this role to the present day.

Two years prior to giving up work I had renewed my childhood interest in computers and acquired an early pentium PC. Shortly after this I discovered the BBS systems and then the Internet. I started to learn how web pages were built and was soon producing simple sites for friends using resources like Geocities.

Over the next couple of years I dabbled with JavaScript, and CGI programming before discovering PHP which with time on my hands I began to learn . Shortly after I was commissioned to produce an e-commerce website that would sell sheet music from a catalogue of approx 68 thousand publications. This site was produced as part of a team of 3 people over 12 weeks. I have continued to work as a member of this team, responsible for all server side programming, for the last 8 years.

During this time I have worked with a wide variety of clients both face to face and over IM systems to plan and produce a range of web sites utilising everything from static HTML to fully interactive PHP/MySQL/XML systems.

Skills

HTML
- Ability to produce browser independent HTML/XHTML mark-up to W3C standards
- Proficient in the use of a wide range of editing platforms
  - Dreamweaver
  - Notepad
  - Bluefish
  - UltraEdit
  - Vim
  - Pico
- Some experience of WAP/WML
CSS
- Production of Standards compliant CSS/XSL style sheets for layout and stylistic control of HTML and XML documents.
- Knowledge of cross browser issues and limitations.
- Use of IE specific Conditional statements
PHP – Able to plan and produce robust commented PHP code. Experience of working with:
- Inline and Object Oriented coding techniques.
- Functions
- GD library for manipulation of images
- MySQL functions
- FTP functions
- XML functions
- String manipulation functions
- File system functions
- Cookies and session management
- Array functions
- Have worked with and modified many open source classes
MySQL – A sound understanding of day to day MySQL Operations
- Database creation
- User management
- Privileges
- MySQL Dump and Data Import
- Relational table design
- Table creation
- Query design

XML
- Experience in creating static and dynamic XML output
- Experience of parsing remote and local XML data
RSS/Atom
- Creation of valid RSS/Atom
- Parsing of remote RSS/Atom
Apache/Linux
- Apache/PHP configuration
- Apache administration
- Server set-up, site and DNS administration on Ensim/RHEL servers
- Home server set-up and administration using Fedora Linux
- Bash shell scripting
JavaScript
- Experience in the deployment of open source JavaScript applications
- Experience of DOM manipulation techniques
- Experience of Asynchronous JavaScript techniques
- JavaScript coding experience
Flash/ActionScript
- Flash MX experienced
- Key frame animation techniques
- ActionScripted animation techniques
- Movie structuring
Other experience
- TCP/IP networking for home/office networks
- Image creation/modification/optimisation in Photoshop
- Experimental experience of many Linux desktop/distributions
- Some Mac OSX experience
- Sourcing, installation and custom modification of many open source applications.

Business experience

For eight years I traded along with a partner, as nex-gen.net, offering web design and development services to a range of small businesses. During this time I was required to:-

Meet with clients new and established to discuss web based solutions to meet there business needs.
Preparation and presentation of quotes and solution documents
Business presentations to introduce and explain the services offered to individuals and groups
Negotiation of rates and terms and conditions

Recent work experience

OpenShop4.biz

For 5 years I worked predominantly on producing e-commerce sites under an in-house brand. Work carried out covered both back end administrative features and public facing elements. Working within an inherited code framework I had responsibility for the production of custom modules to meet identified needs as well as overall responsibility for the management of the framework itself.

During this time the framework was improved to

Produce standards compliant output to the public facing pages
Make use of a CSS based themes system for page layout and decoration
Provide an XML and CSV product import/update system that supports multiple sources
Integrate with Google Base, Google site maps and Google Analytics.
Give improved administrative access to content management features.
Increase integration with a number of payment processing systems including PayPal, ProtX and WorldPay.
Provide a number of Shipping cost solutions
Support EU VAT systems
Provide multiple category assignment to products

Modules to expand functionality have included

Coupon/gift voucher systems
RSS and XML export systems
HTML newsletter system
Customer rating and review systems
Community profile and gallery system
Affiliate sales tracking
Ad serving (internal and Adsense)

TAV Cycles

A replacement site for a failed e-commerce store project undertaken previously by the owner. The new site was required to improve the businesses exposure on the popular search engines, provide a modern clean interface that primarily advertised the services and brands available in-store and provide some opportunities for on-line sales of promotional goods. The site administration was required to be flexible yet simple to operate. Work carried out included

Meeting with client to identify needs and plan solution
Design and layout of public pages
Creation of a secured back end system that provided support for content management of brand information, frequently asked questions, news and blog type articles and promotional sale items and alert emails.

Rivers of Joy Ministries

This international ministry required a new web site that would allow it to reach out and communicate with its audience. Tasked with this a site was designed that would allow the owners to control much of the content displayed on the site. Work carried out included