About
Hi there, my name is Harry Roberts; and before you ask I most definitely am not the infamous police killer! I am however an eighteen year old front-end developer from West Yorkshire (UK) who specialises in web standards, semantics, usability, accessibility and UX/UI. I am completely self-taught (no university for me (which means no debts, too)) over the last two years. My passion for such a fast changing and dynamic industry has led me to strive to better personal achievements in order to be better than I was yesterday — a plan which is going well so far. I think my love for the web can be best summed up as follows:
“The web has inherent limitations and boundaries and it is testing and pushing these boundaries that makes the web so intriguing.” — Me
I live and work in and around Leeds, a great city in the North of the UK. ‘Work’ is Sense Internet where I am employed as a web developer of the front-end variety. It is there that I put my knowledge of CSS, web standards, xHTML, accessibility and usability to use on a variety of different projects for a range of big names such as ASDA, Rizla, BAFTA and more.
Sense
I am currently in full-time employment at the aforementioned Sense Internet (did I mention that it’s Yorkshire’s Best Web Design Company?). I started working for Sense on 14 July, 2008 after a stint working for Keyclicks — a digital marketing agency based in West Yorkshire.
At Sense I work with the ‘Des’ Team who focus on the design and development of the front-end site build, as well as considering and building accessibility into all projects. A forward thinking agency, Sense utilise their staff’s passion and expertise to stay ahead of the game and provide nothing short of up-to-date solutions for all their(/our) clients. The ‘Des’ team work alongside the ‘Prog’ team, a group of geniuses who add the functionality to our stunning designs.
Keyclicks
As I mentioned up there, I used to work as a web developer for Keyclicks, a small firm who provide complete solutions for web, print, identity and marketing. It was at Keyclicks where I held leading knowledge of CSS, xHTML, web standards, usability and accessibility.
Work
I can and do undertake front-end development and web design jobs in my own time, which in increasingly scarce at the moment. There is a chance I may be a little too busy to work on a freelance job, but if you feel I can be of some value to you on a project, please drop me a line to find out my current workload.
The Site
This site runs on a little known blogging engine called BlogoText. However, this is a flat-file engine — it requires no database. This is a pretty cool idea in theory, but in practice, not so. All the static pages are created using my own little PHP OOP framework! I am by no means a programmer, but during my training at work I started dabbling with basic functions and eventually classes and OOP.
A Little Problem
As I mentioned, the whole flat-file thing didn’t work out too well. Once a flat-file blog starts to grow, it doesn’t scale too well. More and more .txt files have to be called procedurally, and that, as you may have noticed, takes time. Lots of time. I’m stuck in a catch 22 with this one though; I could leave it as it is — slow, or I could migrate a database driven blog, but have to start writing articles again from scratch... I’m mulling it over, but for now, please accept my apologies.
Ironically however, the static pages built using my novice framework are lightning fast!