You dream it... I'll build it.


Chris St. John - Full Stack Web Developer

Chris St. John

Cloud Architect Javascript/React Developer Founder

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AWS Certified
AWS Certified


What I Do

flourish
  • Full stack Javascript & Isomorphic Web/Mobile Development
    Vanilla JS, Node JS, React, React Native, Meteor, jQuery, Bootstrap, TDD
  • React & React Native (mobile) UI Development
    Working frequently with React, Redux; GraphQL, Advanced React mobile demos
  • Full stack Node.js, PHP & RoR Web Development
    PHP 5.5/7, Laravel 5, OOP, Ruby on Rails 4, Apache/Nginx, MySQL, NoSQL, REST APIs
  • Cloud Solutions Architect and Web Operations
    Plan & implement cloud strategy & emergency troubleshooting.
    AWS Certified
    AWS Certified
  • Web Performance Optimization & Consulting
    Both front-end & server-side performance tuning, testing & research
  • Lean Startup rapid web development strategies & social media
    Quick builds & fast results, APIs, plugins & and CMS (ie. Wordpress) programming

Portfolio Resume (PDF)



Professional Highlights

Highlights from 15+ years
of Web Development & Management experience

Resume (PDF) Website Portfolio
See Full Portfolio

Founder, Web Architect/Developer, Social Marketing

FreshPatents: Founded & developed a profitable website attracting 65+ million pageviews, with over 100,000 registered users and 35k Twitter followers. An innovative service to help people discover/track new inventions, technologies and scientific research.

Cited in articles by Forbes, Ars Technica, USA Today, Motherboard (Vice News), Fox News, Slate, TechMeme, Car and Driver, Register.co.uk, DailyMail.co.uk, GolfWRX (Golf Digest) and Search Engine Watch, and more. Recommended by NOLO Law Guide books, top-tier university research libraries, and cited in hundreds of academic journal publications (source: Google Scholar),

Coded, designed, managed, and automated operations including major applications like the Keyword Monitor, data-mining, user admin/authentication, processing/transforming data xml from over 6,000 technical documents weekly (60,000+ pages/week) in multiple text and image formats.

Web Architect, Developer, Social Marketing, Videos

RealTimeTouch.com: Lead Web Developer for telemedicine website. Also, developed online marketing campaigns, business plans, videos and social media promotions.

Manager of Web Operations & Production
(Webmaster Group)

MP3.com Managing Webmaster for the public company before, during, and after a $340 million IPO. Managed 5 Web engineers, operating budget of $700k+ and the front-end launch/maintenance of the company's major Web projects.

Developed Web Production processes, webmastered core areas of the MP3.com website and played a key role in high-profile music websites rollouts for artists like Alanis Morrisette, Tori Amos, Music & Technology Tour, and Master P, as well as other innovative music web products. Responsible for technical & front-end website updates/meetings, and worked closely with many groups throughout the company such as in Engineering, project managers, product managers, Marketing, Business departments, at all levels including executives.

Co-founder, Web Architect/Developer
(3.0 redesign in progress)

FreshNews: Modern News Aggregator & RSS reader. Redesigned with a fusion of modern interface technologies & customized Wordpress CMS. Started the early news site (1996), specializing in Southern California tech. New 3.0 redesign with modern javascript interface, XML/RSS/JSON, and filtering techniques. Managing over 120,000 posts, and 10,000+ new articles per week.
Founder, Blogger, Developer

WearableGear: Founder/Editor of the first wearable/mobile computing news site (1997), anticipating many later mobile tech trends such as Google Glass & Fitbit. Notably, wrote the first unboxing/review of a commercial MP3 player in the US (1998).


Co-founder, Web Developer, Marketing

Exploitz Travel & Adventure Guide: Founder/Developer of one of the earliest Travel Community websites, bootstrapping a 5,000+ user base and negotiating an advertising revenue deal with another early competitor, TripAdvisor. Created a stockphoto selling marketplace, sold fine art travel prints, & made thousands of hotel bookings.
Exploitz.com
Other Projects


Chat Lite
Chat Lite
Lightweight chat web client with real-time multiple window private chat and secure private chatroom capability, using Node.js, Bootstrap, React and deployed on Heroku. (Ongoing)
BitcoinForWifi.com
Bitcoin For Wifi
Bali Startup Weekend 2015 finalist team, Indonesia. Innovative idea for Wifi & Bitcoin micropayments. Developed web/prototype interfaces, researched mobile app development costs/options, made a Mobile Jquery sample interface, helped with pitch website & video, wrote technical spec, web server on Busybox (embedded Linux), connected to Bitcoin API, experimented with alternative authentication techiques. (Ongoing)

Craft.API.cc WebDev blog
A technical blog for tracking and discussing new web technologies. Mostly reports news on Javascript, Node.js, React and interesting new programming patterns, frameworks and development tools.(Ongoing)

Faster Web
A detailed Web optimization checklist with over 150 tasks, for HTML/CSS, Javascript, Apache, Nginx, and more. Using detailed analysis from Chrome Web Developer Tools and Firebug. Working on automating. (Ongoing)

BitTerms
A peer-to-peer computing protocol to improve the reliability, efficiency and efficacy of Terms of Service (ToS) agreements. A voluntarily-adopted decentralized standard. (Ongoing)
DevWar
Real-time, head-to-head, split screen gamification of Web Development learning, using Node.js and Socket.io (Ongoing)
Portfolio Resume (PDF)






Front-end Technical Skills

Leveraging a deep knowledge of the client/browser to develop lean interfaces accessing data-rich applications.

flourish

Modern Javascript frameworks, techniques

Efficient interfaces; less backend & network resources.

Build systems better automate development tasks.

React Native iOS and Android

React Native (mobile)

React Native component-based UI for Android & iOS, APIs, Login/Authentication, dynamic & reactive interface, flexbox, forms/event handling, w/Firebase, Genymotion (simulators), Expo (Exponent), NativeBase.

JS

Vanilla Javascript

ES6/ES2015, Babel, AJAX w/native, functional programming with callbacks, closures, promises, prototype inheritance, JS Lint, feasibility consulting, Require.js, TDD, Mocha, Chai & QUnit testing

React.js

React

Redux, React + Material-UI, TDD, React Router, Flux, React & Meteor, Babel, Wireframing & building Components, props, controlling State, integrating JSON data. APIs & Logins, build systems with Webpack, NPM, Gulp, Semantic-ui, Ant.

HTML/CSS

HTML5 & CSS3

Responsive web & mobile interfaces, HTML5 W3C & WhatWG standards, advanced CSS techniques, BEM, flexbox, PostCSS, LESS/SASS/Stylus, Jade, Handlebars, Atom, Sublime, Emmet, Modernizer, minification tooling, Material

Meteor jquery

Meteor & jQuery

Meteor isomorphic javascript with MongoDB, AJAX, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, DOM traversal & manipulation, JSON, forms, event handling.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

Bootstrap CSS & Web components. Developed template library for rapid deployments, lean Startup websites and Hackathons. Great for prototyping, although I'm also using Google Material Design, Material Design Light and Materialize.

git

Git Version Control

Github, command line & GUI, merging branches, diffs, Markdown, Atom integration

NPM

Build Systems

NPM and Webpack, Virtualbox, Vagrant, custom builds/modules - also scaffolding, minification, linting, Hot Module Replacement, task automation: Gulp, Bower, Yeoman

chrome

Dev Tools Testing & Optimization

Advanced optimization & testing techniques with Chrome & Mozilla Dev tools, Lint, waterfall analysis, GT Metrix etc. Developed "Faster Web", a 150 Point Web Optimization Checklist.

Portfolio Resume (PDF)



Server-side Technical Skills

Server-side programming for web application development, webmastering, production and system administration.

The success of my websites and applications propelled me to learn more advanced concepts such as Object-oriented programming, MVC, Linux sysadmin scripting, and many web server techniques such as load balancing, proxies, DNS and security.

AWS Certified
AWS Certified
Node.js

Node.js

NPM, Yarn, Express, Apollo, User Auth, RESTful API w/Postman, JSON, middleware, Yarg, Underscore, node-persists, async callbacks/closures, Moment, morgan, Sequelize ORM, Socket.io, Heroku, error-handling


ruby on rails

Ruby on Rails 4

Ruby & ROR 4, good understanding of MVC, ORM & DRY principles, CRUD operations, User Authentication, security, Automated Testing, integrating javascript/AJAX, Postgres, SQLite, Heroku, SASS/Materialize

PHP

PHP

CMS, User Authentication, Admin amp; Security, OOP principles, MVC, PHP-FIG standards, email (Postfix), XML parsing/manipulation, Imagemagick, PDF/image generation, PDO, Laravel 5, Blade, CakePHP, Composer

mysql
Mongo DB

Databases

CRUD operations, performance optimization, maintenance. Mostly with RDBMS like MySQL & Postgres, but also projects with MongoDB, Firebase, Redis, Sequelize. GraphQL, PHP PDO (OO) and Mysqli APIs.

apache nginx

Apache & Nginx

Apache/Nginx web servers on proxies, mod_rewrites, load balancing, CM, backup solutions, sysadmin with cloud & dedicated servers

Linux

Linux

Ubuntu, Red Hat (RHEL), CentOS and Kali. Configuration management, Bash scripting, regular expressions, cron, Postfix, SSH configuration, server diagnostics, DNS

WordPress

CMS & Advanced WordPress programming

Wordpress customization: templates, plugin mods, WP-CLI, action/filter hooks & functions, OOP content Loop development, XML/JSON output, performance, hacking the Wordpress database tables. Familiar with a wide range of plugins to speed up development/functionality

Portfolio Resume (PDF)



Business Skills

As an entrepreneur, founder and former Production manager, I've worked in many aspects of a web business, not only the technical side.

I have extensive experience with marketing (Social Media, SEO), budgeting, and production/project management. I'm comfortable giving presentations and working with executives to resolve problems and generate new revenue-producing ideas.

Organic SEM Marketing

Developing websites with an eye toward Search Engine visibility. I grew a business without a marketing budget to 25,000 users/day & $100,000+ in revenue using only zero-cost organic marketing techniques.

Production Management

Developed process and planning documents. Coordinated web app product rollouts with a variety of both technical/non-technical colleagues & clients: Executives, Sysadmins, Product Managers, Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Translation vendors and Project Managers.

Social Media Marketing

Developed successful social media campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Over 37,000 followers on Twitter. Very familiar with social marketing tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and many others as well as Twitter and Facebook APIs.

Budgeting, Operations

Responsible for Web Ops department budgets, WebOps project management duties, operations reports, managing ticketing workflow. As a founder, negotiated server, advertising and data subscription contracts and budgeting.

Marketing Analytics

Marketing tracking and optimization with Google Analytics, A/B testing, customized tagging and custom scripting for Google Analytics API.

LEAN Business Strategy

Dedicated to LEAN business for the most effective user acquisition and growth.




Education & Personal Life

ucla
  • Amazon AWS-certified Solutions Architect (Associate)
  • UCLA, graduated with Honors
  • Completed year-long Honor's Thesis
  • Copley Journalism Scholarship
  • Editor-and-Chief at Mesa College Press

Aways upgrading my tech skills with online courses.

Classes at Udemy, as well as other online courses, tutorials and lectures on programming topics such as from Google Talks, Air BnB, Dev Tips, Codecourse, and more

  • React Native Developer Course
  • Complete Node.js Developer Course (30hrs+)
  • Complete Ruby on Rails Developer Course
  • Building Web Apps with React and Flux
  • Advanced React with TDD & Authenticaton
  • PHP OOP: Object Oriented programming
  • Javascript: Understanding the Weird Parts
  • Complete Android Development Course (ongoing)

Other resources

Web Development blogs & resources I keep up with

  • A List Apart
  • CodeGeekz
  • CSS Tricks
  • David Walsh Blog
  • DevTips (You Tube)
  • HackerNews
  • Hongkiat
  • Html5Rocks
  • MDN - Mozilla Developer Network
  • New Boston
  • Rising Stack Engineering
  • Scotch.io
  • Smashing Magazine
  • Survive.js


Travel

Digital nomad for many years in Southeast Asia, Europe, South America and across the USA, with a particular interest in digital photography, trekking and food. Lived recently over 3 years in Asia, in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Songwriting

Songwriter, guitarist, singer, producer with over 35+ original songs, most in ASCAP, experience gigging in L.A. and professional studio recordings. Fluent in Pro Tools, editing and mixing techniques. Played at the Whiskey, Roxy & Troubador in the 1990s.

Martial Arts

Spurred by solo travels to learn self-defense, found a premier MMA gym in San Diego. Learned Braziian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, Boxing and MMA. Trained with UFC fighters, Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai specialists. Trained Muay Thai in Phuket, Thailand, and had one official fight at Phuket's Bangla Stadium, one of the most famous stadiums in Southern Thailand.