Portfolio: http://www.martinburford.co.uk
Latest CV: http://www.martinburford.co.uk/CV-Martin-Burford.doc
PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE:
My programming experience contains (but is certainly not limited to) the following languages:
> HTML (15+ years)
> CSS (15+ years)
> JavaScript (native) (15+ years)
> JavaScript (object-oriented) (15+ years)
> JavaSript (jQuery base framework) (5+ years)
> JavaSript (jQuery custom plugin writing) (8+ years)
> AJAX (11+ years)
> RESTful webservices (11+ years)
> JSON (11+ years)
> XML (11+ years)
> Responsive web builds (8+ years)
API EXPERIENCE:
Throughout the development I do, I’m regularly asked to integrate with APIs, sometimes commercial, and other times there are often bespoke RESTful webservices that I have to consume. Some examples of the more commercial APIs I’ve had to consume are:
> DVLA
> Facebook
> Flickr (multiple times)
> Foursquare
> Google Fusion
> Google Maps v1/2/3
> Instagram
> LinkedIn
> Multimap
> Picasa
> TripAdvisor
> Twitter
> YouTube
PLATFORMS INTEGRATED INTO:
I’ve been a professional front-end programmer for over 15 years, and as such, I’ve worked in countless projects which have had to integrate into back-ends of multiple types. Some of the back-end platforms I’ve had to write code for include:
> .Net (MVC) (multiple times)
> .Net (webforms) (multiple times)
> AppEngine
> epiServer (multiple times)
> Grails/Groovy
> JSTL
> Node
> PHP (multiple times)
> Python
> Teamsite (multiple times)
> Umbraco
TECHNICAL SPECIALITIES:
> Accessibility coding
> Advanced HTML 4/5
> AJAX
> API coding
> Content management integration
> Cross-browser coding
> Geo-locational coding
> Google Fusion
> Google Maps
> GruntJS
> HTML semantics
> IA/UX
> JavaScript (native)
> jQuery base framework (1.3.2 through to 2+)
> jQuery plugin writing
> JSON/JSONP
> KML
> Mentoring
> Multi-lingual website builds
> Object orientated programming
> Progressive enhancement
> Proxies
> Responsive website development
> SASS
> Webservices
> XML
Senior Front-End Developer @ I am currently working on a huge greenfield project, helping with the overall architecture of the new digital platform for a company with daily traffic levels in the tens of millions. The technical stack being used comprises of full native JavaScript using Express on Node. In addition, some of the other technologies being used are Grunt, Karma, Mocha, Jade, Browserify, SASS. The list goes on... :)
I'm currently booked in this role until the end of March 2016. Feel free to get in touch with me mid-March to get an update on my availability at that time. From August 2015 to Present (5 months) London, United KingdomDirector @ From October 2011 to Present (4 years 3 months) Lead UI Developer @ I worked at Barclays on a front and back-end component library, built via a combination of custom templates and a JSON configuration engine. My responsibility related to the complete ownership of the JavaScript controller and the interactive functionality of all individual components. In addition to that, I also wrote the projects entire set of GruntJS automation scripts, enabling full sites (consisting of hundreds of pages) to be compiled in a matter of seconds. For the 12 months I spent at Barclays, I played a lead role in the team overseeing all aspects of the overall front-end development. From August 2014 to August 2015 (1 year 1 month) London, United KingdomSenior Front-End Developer @ I was originally hired by Trinity Mirror to bring to life several complex prototypes in order establish the feasibility of a number of new technologies, in respect of Trinity Mirrors existing content. After completing these prototypes, one such piece of work I built was so well received by the business that budget was allocated for the technologies I had written to be harnessed for a much larger football based project. Partnering with Opta, who perform statistical analysis on the Barclays Premier League, I wrote a real-time consumption framework of their data to allow Trinity Mirror to show live updates of the entire league during match days. After this work was completed, I extended the code to work for the 2014 football World Cup. The framework was coded to work on desktop browsers, tablets and mobile devices. In addition to this, a cross-section of other work I built during my time at Trinity Mirror included an entire JSON driven data visualization framework, canvas-based real-time heatmaps, particle fireworks, circular navigation systems, mobile friendly touch sensitive draggable voting plugins and a vast number of (websocket based) real-time JavaScript plugins, such as live football league tables, live graphs and live blog feeds. From July 2013 to August 2014 (1 year 2 months) London, United KingdomSenior Interactive Developer (freelance) @ I was hired by VML to lead the development of a full responsive site build for their client Whitbread. The site comprised of approximately 125 pages and approaching 100 unique components. Due to the browser/device requirements, and a lack of browser support, I was unable to use CSS media queries. As a result, I opted to use the Adapt.js responsive framework. The website designs required both visual and functional differences between the different render modes (mobile and desktop), so I built an extensive framework to compliment Adapt, in order to activate and de-activate significant areas of site functionality when switching between device resolutions. This was coupled with 13 unique colour themes throughout the site, a combination of website section themes and corporate brand colours. These themes were made possible via a comprehensive use of CSS specificity. All JavaScript was built into a number of namespaces, built to work alongside jQuery, with functionality such as carousels built via bespoke jQuery plugins in order to deliver against the exact project requirements. Also whilst at VML, I was asked to implement a solution for another client, Premier League, whereby SVG graphing tracked the progress of teams throughout the football season. This was something that had been a pending piece of work for around 18 months at the time, and was something I was able to complete in just a single day, delighting their client. From March 2013 to July 2013 (5 months) London, United KingdomSenior Front-End Developer (freelance) @ I worked on 2 fairly similar projects during my 4 months at Profero. Both were extremely rich (in functionality) responsive front-end websites, built to work across desktop, mobile and tablet using a combination of HTML4/5, CSS 2/3 and JavaScript. The first site was designed and built as a full-screen immersive user experience, whereas the second was restricted and governed by a Sharepoint set of templates, running at fixed-width dimensions. Both were built 100% by me from scratch through to completion. The full-screen site required the building of a complete timelining JavaScript framework, allowing for a Flash-esque timeline and queuing mechanism, along with being dynamic in it’s ablity to render in 1 of 4 different languages. The fixed-width site was more of a scroll site, albeit with gesture based alternatives for mobile and tablet switched in at appropriate times. From December 2012 to March 2013 (4 months) London, United KingdomSenior Front-End Developer (freelance) @ This was a 1 month contract where I was hired to build a fully functional set of CSS, HTML and JavaScript-rich templates for Jams client, Sky. Once supplied to Sky, their own in-house development team were then fully responsible for data integration, which for this particular project, consumed a number of their own secure APIs, providing data for Skys tv listings and functionality for many of their unique offerings such as remote record. From October 2012 to November 2012 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior Front-End Developer (freelance) @ I was hired by Ogilvy Action originally to build a highly interactive JavaScript website from scratch. That was cancelled on my first morning, so I ended up working on lots of bits and pieces for around 2 months. This included a HTML5 LocalStorage reporting framework, a bespoke PhoneGap iPad app from the ground up as well as creating a new eDetail iPad platform, with some fairly significant CSS3 flip effect functionality. From September 2012 to October 2012 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior Front-End Developer (freelance) @ I was hired by New Brand Vision to bring to life a concept their internal team had come up with, whereby they wanted a fullscreen horizontal scroller to indicate different sections of a clients website, much like the new BBC site. I built this from scratch within 2-3 days, and was inclusive of full "no JavaScript" support, as well as full multi-gesture support, for the scrolling between different slides. In addition to this work, there were also a number of other templates which required building, for content population by the internal team after I finished. From September 2012 to September 2012 (1 month) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Developer (freelance) @ I was hired by Fox Parrack Singapour to convert a piece of print work produced for Cisco over to a website. The delivery of this was via a single-page site, but using the concept of slides, where many slides could belong to a single page. It worked a little like an interactive slideshow, with many clever jQuery animations built, to make it both look and function very smoothly. I built all CSS, HTML and JavaScript over the course of the 1 week long contract. From August 2012 to August 2012 (1 month) London, United KingdomFront-End Technical Lead (freelance) @ I worked at The Mill in London for 3 months, helping out their digital team with a couple of websites for their client, Acer. These sites were both multi-lingual, built to work in over 35 unique languages. I was responsible for writing the entire code structure of the sites, inclusive of all CSS, HTML, JavaScript, along with the framework to perform the translation capabilities. The HTML5 version of the site included a huge level of fully bespoke written animation wrapped into a number of JavaScript namespaces and custom jQuery plugins. From May 2012 to July 2012 (3 months) London, United KingdomSenior Front-End Developer (freelance) @ I was hired by Stink Digital to build a YouTube channel for their client, Sonar. Sonar is an annual multi-day music festival, in 2012, taking place in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The requirement from Stink was to build the channel in 3 separate languages, English, Portugese and Spanish. Many of the components I built for this project were XML driven, at the request of Stink, along with a number of custom written jQuery plugins and a significant language translation engine I bespoke wrote, to work alongside the Python and AppEngine back-end. From April 2012 to May 2012 (2 months) London, United KingdomLead Internet Engineer (freelance) @ I was hired by LBi to work on quite a few different projects. This included building a number of interactive, webservice driven image galleries, with both left-to-right and full right-to-left support. On another client, FOM, I was asked to build some of the more complex elements to the GP2 and GP3 motorsport series websites. This functionality involved intricate countdown timers, catering for all associated timezones, offsets, UTC vs GMT and so on. Finally, I built the entire front-end framework for a tablet-focused site for Barclays, which formed their main UK .co.uk website. From December 2011 to March 2012 (4 months) Senior Web Developer (freelance) @ I worked at AKQA on a large project for one of their biggest clients, Nike, focusing on a complex mapping implementation. This involved latitudinal and longitudinal projections to enable dynamic tile loading via cached webservices. The main reason for this was because the mapping application was expected to receive around 100,000+ marker points, which quite obviously couldn't all be added to a single map instance at once. I wrote all the JavaScript through a number of custom Nike namespaces to allow a huge number of configurable variations of just how (and more importantly, when) different geolocational datasets were appended to the map. From October 2011 to December 2011 (3 months) London, United KingdomLead Front End Engineer (freelance) @ I re-built the entire front-end platform (encompassing CSS 2/3, HTML 4/5 and JavaScript/jQuery) for Timeout.com which initially covered comprehensive and complex template builds for their London, Paris and New York websites. Subsequent site deployments to a large number of world cities (in a variety of different languages) is to follow using the code I wrote as the core front-end codebase. From July 2011 to October 2011 (4 months) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Engineer (freelance) @ I contracted back at Publicis, returning to work on the site I built for around 5 months in the early part of 2011. The work this time involved adding localization to the site. To start with, full support had to be added for Spanish and Russian languages. From June 2011 to July 2011 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Engineer (freelance) @ I spent just under a month at Tribal building a highly interactive JavaScript overlay widget for the existing Volkswagen UK website, which offers the functionality of booking a testdrive from a range of different VW cars/models. Functionality was also built to support real-time (closest) dealer lookups as well as reservation slots in order to make the user experience as easy and interactive as possible. From May 2011 to June 2011 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Engineer (freelance) @ For my 5 months at Publicis Modem, I worked on a rich interface build, including significant levels of sequence animations to work with both standard web browsers as well as touchscreen devices, inclusive of iPhone and iPad. In order to allow for this, I built a robust and extendable framework to allow for numerous rendering modes, handling a variety of browser and device quirks. The site was also built to fully support complete customization and localization. From January 2011 to May 2011 (5 months) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Engineer (freelance) @ My contract at Wunderman involved writing an OO JavaScript (native, not jQuery) framework to translate existing Sophus tracking tags into far more complex Omniture tags, via a highly configurable and extendable XML translation engine (which I also wrote). Whilst my initial involvement was to build the solution for just 2 sites as part of a pilot, the intention was to progressively roll out the functionality to around 20-25 additional sites over subsequent months. From December 2010 to January 2011 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior Developer (freelance) @ I worked at R/GA on a complex HTML and JavaScript (jQuery) build which is a functional set of administration screens to a nationwide touchscreen in-store system for Nokia. Architecture-wise, .net 4 MVC was used, and I was responsible for creating all of the front-end development, whilst working with the lead .net developer to ensure simple front-end to back-end integration. I wrote 6 bespoke jQuery plugins, enabling both optimal code and ease of extensibility in the future, combined with progressive enhancement and complete browser consistency. From October 2010 to December 2010 (3 months) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Engineer (freelance) @ I returned to Digitas London to continue working on an advanced JavaScript project which focuses on API communication with both Amazons and Tescos open APIs to transparently add items to peoples shopping carts away from either of the retailers commericial .com domains. The delivery of this functionality is via Flash ad banners, and is made possible via an extensive Java set of APIs which are consumed using jQuery and JSON. From August 2010 to September 2010 (2 months) London, United KingdomLead Internet Engineer (freelance) @ Having built the entire front-end framework for LBis client, House of Parliament during a previous 6 month contract, I was asked to return for a shorter contract in order to build a highly interactive jQuery-based slideshow. This was coded as a standalone jQuery plugin, and contained high levels of animation, time sequencing, inline vs overlay functionality along with dynamic content population via .net webservices serving up JSON data objects. From July 2010 to August 2010 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior JavaScript Engineer (freelance) @ I freelanced at Digitas London on an advanced JavaScript project which focused on API communication with both Amazons and Tescos open APIs to transparently add items to peoples shopping carts away from either of the retailers commericial .com domains. The delivery of this functionality was via Flash ad banners, and was made possible via an extensive Java set of APIs which were consumed using jQuery and JSON. From June 2010 to July 2010 (2 months) London, United KingdomSenior Interactive Developer (freelance) @ Was bought on board at Sapient to lead the front-end development of the re-skin and re-architecture of Lebara.com, a set of multi-lingual sites offering purchase of pre-pay SIM cards online. Amongst other things, this included educating the development team as to the intracacies and best development practices of right-to-left reading sites. From May 2010 to June 2010 (2 months) London, United KingdomLead Internet Engineer (freelance) @ This was initially a 3 month contract (extended to 5 months) whereby I re-wrote the official website for the UK Parliament, http://www.parliament.uk. I coded the entire front-end using HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), AJAX and JSON. I also worked closely with the back-end development team to ensure integration into the back-end epiServer architecture was as simple and effective as possible. From December 2009 to May 2010 (6 months) London, United KingdomSenior Client-side Developer (freelance) @ Did some fairly straighforward work as part of my 2 week contract for GT. This included some Silverlight and XSLT along with the associated integration into the Microsoft MSPX custom templating engine. From November 2009 to December 2009 (2 months) London, United KingdomLead Client-Side, DWR, jQuery, JSON, Java, JSTL, Spring, Tiles integration Developer (freelance) @ Autoquake are the UKs biggest online retailer of used cars, and hired me to enable their existing platform to be able to support white-labelling, allowing for the underlying architecture and functionality to be easily and cost-effectively rolled out to partnering suppliers of cars. The role, recently completed, enabled Autoquake to offer clients the ability to operate standalone versions of their ecommerce platform, branded to meet any design. Technically, this was possible via a highly configurable Spring and JSTL back-end along with a strongly architected front-end allowing for visual and functional theme switching. My 3 month role at Autoquake involved rebuilding the core Autoquake platform from scratch (http://www.autoquake.com), along with the creation of their first white-labelled site, for their client, ALD (http://ald.autoquake.com). From August 2009 to November 2009 (4 months) London, United KingdomSenior Developer (freelance) @ I was bought on board to work on 2 elements of a new website for Pirata: ecommerce payment system integration and also to build a number of highly complex re-usable JavaScript/jQuery library extensions. From June 2009 to July 2009 (2 months) London, United KingdomLead Developer (freelance) @ Clash Media hired me to re-build their global online presence. This is currently an ongoing project and involves the building of a complete CMS along with all of the elements to build the front-end sites across 6 separate languages. From March 2009 to June 2009 (4 months) London, United KingdomChief Technical Architect (freelance) @ This was a slight change to the type of work I’d previously been involved in. With senior roles in the past, there was always an extensive level of exposure to architecture. However, my role at Euro RSCG was acting as head of the growing architecture team, helping to streamline and improve the quality of technical support through the organinzations offerings. This ranged from systems and programmatic architecture through to programming standards. I also acted as the main technical member of staff for liasing with 3rd party production houses, both on and offshore. A full-time position was offered by Euro, but I decided to look elsewhere for a slightly more development focussed position. From February 2009 to April 2009 (3 months) London, United KingdomPHP Developer (freelance) @ I was bought into FutureBrand on a 4 week contract (was subsequently extended) to lead the development team and help out with a project for Barclays. An executive-focused group of websites, primarily built in India needed some highly complex PHP objects to be written for a new databased xml caching engine. From January 2009 to February 2009 (2 months) London, United KingdomTechnical Director @ As Technical Director, my role spanned multiple facets. First and foremost I managed all technology staff out of the London office day to day, beit freelance or permanent. In addition to that, as the most senior technical member of a workforce of over 100, I was heavily involved in client liaison for each and every project Grand Union work on. As such, I was highly responsible for ensuring regular capital flowing into the organizatinon through successful pitches/new work and ongoing project retainers. In addition to this, I was a significant driving force in putting together statements of work along with scoping and many other forms of technical documentation as required. From September 2008 to January 2009 (5 months) London, United KingdomPrincipal Software Engineer @ At Digitas, my role varied greatly from day to day. With extensive front-end and back-end development experience along with team management skills, I was involved in the majority of technology-based client work that Digitas did. This typically ranged from general management of an entire project to full CMS builds to multi-lingual xml-based flash integrations. All work in this role (subject to client requirements) met "AA" W3C WAI compliancy regulations utilizing CSS2, and where applicable, CSS3. All layouts were 100% relative, were stringently built to be fully cross-browser between PC and Mac web browsers, and were always coded highly semantically. Towards the end of my contract, the role shifted somewhat to more of a leadership position with direct line management of a number of technical staff along with being the figurehead in the organization for ensuring consistently high quality code production via a number of means, one of which being regular code reviews. From July 2004 to September 2008 (4 years 3 months) London, United KingdomSenior Software Engineer @ From July 2004 to August 2006 (2 years 2 months) London, United KingdomSenior Web Developer @ I spent around 3 years in this role, and my main duties included acting as a lead for the ongoing development of several websites/applications, both web and Cd based. Responsibilities also extended to initial project specification, site design, usability issues, database design/development and implementation. The role spanned full life cycle, including high emphasis towards crisp, front-end interfaces, providing ease of use to site visitors. I breached both the design and technical aspects of all projects, and was responsible in ensuring a variety of different technologies merged seamlessly into the final result of a completed project. From July 2001 to June 2004 (3 years) Software Engineer @ Worked on a large-scale VB application to simplify facilities management From 2000 to 2001 (1 year) London, United KingdomWeb Developer @ Development of www.hof.co.uk From 1999 to 2000 (1 year) London, United Kingdom
BSc Hons, Internet Technology @ Staffordshire University From 1997 to 2001 Martin Burford is skilled in: Accessibility coding, Advanced Cross-browser coding, Advanced CSS coding, Advanced HTML/XHTML, Advanced jQuery, Advanced Progressive Enhancement, Advanced Semantic coding, AJAX, API coding, Bespoke jQuery plugin writing, Content management integration, Geo-locational coding, HTML 5, IA/UX, JavaScript
Websites:
http://www.martinburford.co.uk