Jesse Mills

jesse_mills@outlook.com
613-449-9043

I care about my craft. Web Developer at the Frontenac News. Open to part-time employment.


Web Development

For some examples of my skill (besides this beautiful, beautiful site):

Frontenac News Redesign (project link)

Redesigned with accessibility in mind. Not just for those with visual impairments, but also those living with shoddy Internet (common in Frontenac), and seniors using ancient browsers out of familiarity.

I reduced the average page size by over 85% across most of the site, it's compatible back to IE8, works without javascript, and has an accessible font size without any extra configuration.

The site's frontend is almost entirely custom code written for the specific needs of the Frontenac News, and the backend is mostly managed by the CMS except for a custom plugin that clears the cache for specific pages when they're modified.

Using some javascript tricks, the site provides dynamic content like rotating ads and suggested stories on pages that are completely cached, without making AJAX calls. That last bit is important on satellite internet connections where the latency is so bad that by the time you've loaded an ad you've already scrolled past it. There is also a fallback if Javascript is not available.

Technologies used: PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Regex, Joomla, Cloudflare.

Asterios Kills a Kid(project link)

As a passion project, I had a lot of leeway in designing this site which allowed me to experiment a lot. For example: the Frontenac News project used the CMS Joomla and was written in PHP, this one used the static site generator Hugo and was templated in GO.

Changes were made locally, and then pushed to the site using git as a publishing mechanism. The result was not only a blazing fast website, but one that was incredibly secure.

Since it was a mock-childrens-advice-podcast, I illustrated all of the graphics. Then, because they're sharper and smaller file size when compressed, I posted them as SVGs (with png fallbacks of course). To keep the site performant on mobile (because SVG files can cause screen tearing when scrolling) I wrote custom javascript to rasterize the images on load.

Technologies used: Hugo, HTML, CSS, Javascript, GO, Git.

Other Projects

Here's a taste of some other web and programming projects I've worked on.

Video Production

Before a career shift I made a living doing video work. I still freelance occasionally and below are a few examples of my work:


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