My story begins with a vibey neighbourhood cafe which quickly became an integral part of the Vredehoek cafe culture located in sunny Cape Town, SA.

I took on this project during the break between my second and third year of studies. The opportunity to build something from the ground up was invaluable to my perspective on design and progression as a developer.

The cafe site paid off as it got me my first gig with UK based firm, WKM Global. It was here that I came to learn the ins and outs of WordPress while experimenting with techniques such as AJAX, Flexbox and CSS animations.

As our requirements grew more complex, it became clear we needed to improve our workflow and website performance so the decision was made to move from shared to cloud hosting. I gained further experience and skills, this time on the Backend, by learning to install and configure web servers and setting up Git version control via Microsoft Azure DevOps. The IoT Global Awards site was the first to benefit from our new infrastructure.

By mid 2018 I had a solid understanding of WordPress. Apart from IoT Global Awards I had also built a couple news portals expanding my knowledge to include posts, categories and tags along with commonly used plugins such as Yoast SEO.

WKM was now in need of a more customisable payment system for users of its various websites. Having prior knowledge of Zend Framework 2, I was excited to dive into the latest version and build my first web application. This was also an opportunity to work with the Sage Pay REST API, something I'm sure will come in handy down the road.

Fast forward to March 2019 and I find myself starting a new job for an exciting company called Expat Explore Travel. What I loved most about the move was that they use the JAMstack development architecture and my role would be purely frontend.

My primary project was the search page. At the time, Expat was still using WordPress for this page and part of the migration to Contentful included rebuilding search with Vue which I had never used before, but was keen on learning. A few months, a redesign and many improvements later, search has now become an NPM package to be used on any page that features a list of tours. At the time of writing this, search is being split tested using the VWO platform and the new and improved version is featured below.