End of 2012 Review
At the end of a year I like looking back and seeing what I’ve accomplished and what new technologies I started working with in the year. Here’s a little summary.
Archive for Personal
Mac Software I Use
I just got a sweet new MacBook Pro Retina – way faster than my old MBP. I wanted to do a clean install rather than restoring from a TimeMachine backup, which meant reinstalling software and manually transferring stuff over that I really needed. I kept a list…
PhilFreo.com v3 (and past versions)
I setup my first personal webpage (philfreo.com) in 2004 when I was in high school. It’s had some server-side includes and a tiny amount of logic written in ASP. It looked like this:
I redesigned it once in 2006 during my Yahoo! internship, and it looked like this:
And there my website sat from 2006 until 2012. That’s forever in internet years!
So here we are in the summer of 2012 – time for a redesign! Nothing too fancy, just clean up the styles to be more modern and representative of the current web. It should tell people about the 2012 Phil Freo rather than the high school or college version of me. It should no longer focused on my freelance website design (where I once dominated SEO for terms like “gainesville web design” and “jacksonville web design”) and now more focused on my work with startups, modern full-stack web development, and my blog.
You’re probably looking at the new site now, but for archival purposes, here are some screenshots:
Homepage:
Blog article page:
Two Years at Quizlet
The last two years (2010-2011) I spent working at Quizlet were an incredible learning experience.
Like I did in Jan 2010, I wanted to reflect on some of the technologies I learned and things I did over the last 2 years…
Behind the scenes look at my work at Quizlet
I just wrote a pretty in-depth article on the Quizlet Blog: “How We Do Product Development at Quizlet: An Inside Look at the Making of Speller” which describes the process of how Andrew and I created “Speller”, the latest study mode on Quizlet.
…a behind the scenes look at how we created Speller, our engineering challenges and processes, and how we obsessed over the user experience and the educational experience.
Includes some technical details of how we programmed it (mostly JavaScript), the text-to-speech, development process and usability testing, and lots of screenshots of the different iterations we did in order to get the UI right.
It’s a little long, but hopefully worth the read!
New Job with Startup: Old School Industries
I just accepted a full-time position at a small startup in San Francisco as a lead Developer and Product Manager. The company is called Old School Industries LLC and is a combination of two businesses: Quizlet and Collectors Weekly.
Technologies I’ve worked with in 2009
One benefit of doing freelance development work is that I get the opportunity to get involved in many different technologies and frameworks in a short amount of time.
Since the year is over… here’s a quick list of 15 technologies/frameworks that I got to learn in 2009 alone, during my last year in college.
Graduation thoughts: best classes at UF for Computer Engineering
In three weeks from today, I will have graduated, with honors, from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Computer Engineering (software emphasis) and a minor in Business Administration. Overall, I’ve had an incredible college experience and have learned a ton, had some great experiences, and built relationships with a lot of really great people.
I thought it’d be worth mentioning the classes at UF that, looking back, had the greatest impact on me. I’ve taken a bunch of classes over the past 4.5 years, but these were the ones that I really can appreciate the most…
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Now I’m a PHP5 Zend Certified Engineer
I had a few goals for this summer away from school. I wanted to go to some tech conferences, check out more startups and web companies in both Silicon Valley and closer to home in Florida, and continue with my freelance development work. I also decided I wanted to take the Zend PHP 5 Certification test to learn more, see what I know, and to separate myself from every other kid who thinks they know PHP.
Google Summer Internship Completed / Goodbye California
This summer I had the privilege to intern at Google and spent another summer in Silicon Valley – the hub of all things tech-related. My internship lasted 10 weeks and, much like my Yahoo! internship last summer (I gave my reasons for not going back to Yahoo! this summer), I had an incredible experience.
