Hello, I'm Amelia Winstead and I'm a professional developer, designer, and above all else, creator. I love making things.
I've been a professional developer as a career for more than 10 years, and I worked as a professional designer for another 8 before that. Because of my experience with both design and development, I can complete entire projects solo without any difficulty, but I prefer working with a team!
I've worked using Agile workflows, such as Kanban and Scrum, and I enjoy project proposals with mocks or wireframes and direct communication between team members during the constructive process.
The best thing about working with me is that I am both practical and not afraid to try new things. I love learning new programming frameworks and exploring the limits of current web-based technology. Sometimes cutting edge technology is required, but most of the time, industry-standard or soon-to-be industry standards work more reliably, and have better support than styling and coding techniques that haven't quite found their footing yet. This is where being practical comes in very handy, and no time is wasted pursueing technologies that won't work for the scope of the project I'm assigned. Being practical means I also don't waste time with tech jaron unless I am talking with another developer or designer, and I can easily relate programming technologies to plain English so that there is rarely any miscommunication about intended functionality or progress made on projects. I love getting into a good discussion about programming with other developers though, when time allows!
My strongest programming languages are PHP, SQL, ReactJS, Javascript and Jquery, and my expertise in development would be building large systems from the ground up or using frameworks with an eye towards security and performance, although I have worked in a number of homebrew custom environments. For design work, I am most comfortable with direct CSS/SCSS, Photoshop CS3, or Elements 2.0. I've used tons of different IDEs (such as Notepad++, PHPStorm and VSCode, Pycharm) and am comfortable using any of them.
I'm a minimalist, so most of what I write is as simple as I can make it while still achieving the desired results. I find this works very well for working in team and agile environments (no guesswork on variable names, and no time wasted digging through complex or unintuitive framework architecture) and for efficiency in delivering functional codes on deadlines. It also makes flexability for future additions to original codes or designs a cinche.
Building AmeliaWinstead.com
This site was initially going to be a Laravel spin up, but then I decided that there wouldn't be enough challenge in that, since I've used Laravel before. So instead, it became a custom MVC build, and I'm in the process right now of converting it into a minimalist CMS for redistribution as a an official framework package as well (look for it! It will likely have my name in the code credits somewhere). Right now its running on HTML, CSS, Flexbox for responsiveness, Font Awesome, and jQuery with PHP behind it, but it also has an SQL database layer behind the content itself. I've never built a design like this (full width with mixed color pallette without standard bootstrap styling) but I like how it turned out.
Personal
Programming is both an occupation and a passion for me, but I do not follow the mentality of coding til dawn and then crawling in to work running on nothing but caffiene. I believe a healthy lifestyle and programming can coexist. Putting in the time and effort to make a project amazing before its final deadline is something I've always found rewarding, since I enjoy rising to the meet challenges.
I'm very interested in anything relating to science and education, and I have a long background in both. In particular, I love neuroscience, genetic inheriance, and edu-tainment games.
In my spare time, I love to attend hackathons and programming events like GoCode and Global Game Jam, and I also write and sell software packages on occasion. Additionally I run the Lasria LLC through Patreon, making sure that it receives at least quarterly code and art updates. I've got a diverse group of pet projects I am working on, including a self made gaming MMORPG (Lasria LLC), a raspberry pi magic mirror, and a CMS for google analytics API data paired with a chart.js display, to make it easier to understand and manage data. I'm also an approved instructor part time on codementor.com, but I also enjoy spending my time on sites like codecademy, codefights.com, udemy, and lynda.com.