Patrick J. Collins

pat@burned.com
http://burned.com

Work Experience

Interactive Developer/Designer, Wall-to-Wall Studios (W|W), Pittsburgh, PA

6/2006–6/2010

  • Acted as head designer, architect, developer, and head geek for numerous projects, taking on role of primary technical contact
  • Solely architected and developed a strategic overhaul of W|W CMS (the in-house content management system) and the CMS framework behind it, enabling the firm to handle large web projects and custom development efforts
  • Designed and implemented a drag-and-drop form builder application (as a modular add-on to W|W CMS) to aid clients in capturing data on their web site using customizable web forms
  • Recommended and implemented several in-house technical endeavors, including setting up multiple dedicated servers to serve as critical infrastructure, organization of source code into the Subversion and Git source code management platforms, launching an internal bug tracking tool, and synchronizing internal authentication using LDAP
  • Increased team productivity by establishing and reinforcing web development best practices, including an object-oriented programming approach, implementation of the MVC design pattern, automated deployment, automated server provisioning, and continuous integration

Web/Media Services Specialist, Epidemiology Data Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

1/2004–6/2006

  • Planned, designed, developed, and customized web systems in direct collaboration with Web/Media Services Manager
  • Designed identity elements to be used in all media for medical studies, internal projects, and University departments
  • Ensured usability and accessibility standards were met for audiences with special needs
  • Start-to-finish design and production of print assets such as flyers, brochures, guides, and posters
  • Maintained content relevant to medical study web sites for the Department of Epidemiology
  • Provided professional web development services for departments throughout the University of Pittsburgh

Education

Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA

B.A., Interactive Media. Concentrations in Computer Science and Web Design & Development. Topics studied: Instructional design, network programming, database management. Graduated cum laude. (2001–2005)

M.S., Multimedia Technology. Topics studied: Project management, media writing, human-computer interaction. Graduated summa cum laude. (2005–2006)

Affiliations

Founder, Refresh Pittsburgh, 2005–present

Skills

  • Design: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
  • Front-end Development: (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM
  • Back-end Development: PHP, Python, Ruby
  • Frameworks: jQuery (JavaScript), ExtJS (JavaScript), CakePHP (PHP)
  • Helper Technologies and Concepts: MVC, AJAX, XML, XSLT, JSON, Regular Expressions, Web Services, Subversion, Git
  • Database management: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, ODBC
  • OS Platforms: Mac OS X, Windows, Linux. Very comfortable in command-line environments.

Currently Really Excited About

Chef infrastructure automation, server-side JavaScript application development, PHP 5.3, Doctrine 2 ORM, Capistrano, Sinatra 1.0, Rails 3, Google App Engine, continuous integration and continuous deployment.