Home - iaminawe

I am a freelance web developer consulting on, building and theming responsive Drupal sites and systems.

I also create work as one half of design, web and animation studio iaminawe.

I am an experienced, motivated & ambitious creative professional comfortable working across a range of various web, design & animation disciplines.

I am comfortable taking a project from concept stages through to final execution. I thrive on challenge and push myself to create high quality work at every level in every medium.

I am enthusiastic and passionate about the work I do and am happy working alone or as part of a team

I Like to

Plan, design, build, deploy and optimize awesome drupal websites.
Build iOS apps using Appcelerator Titanium
Create motion graphics & animation for broadcast, web and events.
Stay sharp, read books, watch training videos ask questions and learn new things.
Try new tools, techniques and ideas to be more productive & efficient.
Teach what I know and learn about what I don't.

Experience

Freelance

Feb 2012 – Current

Contractor & Consultant

http://www.greggcoppen.com

I provide freelance web development and consulting services to other drupal shops as well as to my own clients.

I am available as an addition to an existing team, usually working with a project manager, performing tasks via assigned issues including site and feature building, design and theming, QA and troubleshooting

I am available to take on solo full site builds, site updates & theming work that I project manage myself and deliver to schedule using an issue tracker.

I am available as a consultant to offer ideas, advice, implementation assistance, training and support on a range of Drupal and Aegir related topics

Iaminawe

June 2001- Current

Owner, Developer, Animator

http://www.iaminawe.com

Iaminawe is the web development, design & animation studio I have run and created work for since 2000.

I have been responsible for successfully executing many projects of varying scale across all manner of media including for the web, broadcast, theatre and print.

My business role encompasses meeting with clients, evaluating requirements, establishing objectives and generating time/cost estimates. I also was responsible for project management, giving presentations/ pitches, business administration and documentation for completed projects.

My web development role involves strategic planning, site architecture, wireframing & prototyping. I build the sites to the established specifications using either Drupal or WordPress and work with a designer (or design myself) to theme the front-end with standards based, semantically written, search engine optimized HTML5/CSS3/JQuery templates.

My animation role involves creative direction, storyboarding, editing, compositing, animating and DVD authoring for broadcast, theatre, web and live event output.

North Studio

October 2010 – February 2012

Senior Drupal Developer

http://www.northstudio.com

I worked as a senior drupal developer, site builder and themer for northStudio handling a range of different scale drupal sites and systems.

I worked with the project managers and team on bigger projects and directly with clients on mid range projects that I would manage, develop and support.

I also was responsible for a range of repair, support and ongoing maintenance work for a range of Drupal systems and sites.

Interactive Africa

January 2009- April 2010

Web Producer

http://www.designindaba.com

I was responsible for conceptualizing,planning, building and managing the Design Indaba website. I was tasked with building a best of class site in Drupal and spent time researching and implementing these practices.

The site encompasses a custom members video system hosted off Amazon S3, an extensive articles publishing system for the magazine, a conference registration and user management system, a multi user blog and marketplace e-commerce platform The site had some complex registration processes that provided key integration of business processes. I built and maintained the high performance Project Mercury LAMP server the site is built on and worked with the in-house design studio to implement a 960.gs based custom theme.

In addition I created competition micro-sites, motion graphics, 3D animations, interactive flash presentations and stage designs for range of high profile clients including FIFA & Vodacom.

Mission Advertising, London

Oct 2000 – June 2001

Flash Animator/ Designer

I worked primarily in Flash and Dreamweaver creating animated web content and training CD-Roms for large shipping clients.

The work was to tight weekly deadlines and I was responsible for concept to delivery on a range of jobs. This encompassed design, animation and programming.

Teaching & Training

January 2000 – 2011

Since graduating I have taught design and animation skills and software on various occasions in various countries

1999-2000 Mediatek, Durban, SA – DTP, Web Design & Video Production
2000 French Woods Festival, New York, USA – Web Design & Animation to children
2007 Friends of Design, Cape Town, SA – After Effects Basics course
2010-2011 Q College, Victoria, Canada – Various Drupal related training for students
2010-2011 northStudio, Victoria, Canada – Various Drupal related site and system training for clients

Education

Online Learning I am self motivated and am constantly learning new things from a range of online sources including a badge collection over at Treehouse and working on my programming over at Codecademy
2008 – UCT Graduate School of Business "Business Acumen for Artists" course
1996-1999 – Mediatek Digital Graphic Design Diploma Durban, South Africa
- Traditional & digital graphic design, web design & video production
- 2nd & 3rd Year Student of the Year
1991-1996 – Durban High School , South Africa – Matriculated with Exemption

Skills

I specialize in building robust, attractive & responsive drupal sites & have developed an excellent knowledge of the various modules, themes & development practices required for doing so. I have 6 years of experience working with and manipulating drupal to do a wide range of things and have particular interest in using it to build products and to power native mobile applications.

I am primarily a front end developer and site builder and have an extensive knowledge of Drupal’s eco-system and have planned and built many types of Drupal sites from the ground up. I am experienced working with a range of themes and frameworks including Omega (3 & 4), Zen, Bootstrap and Foundation and I am comfortable using SASS/Compass and LESS preprocessors.

I develop and build sites using community best practice techniques and make heavy use of git, drush, install profiles, make files and features to ensure portability between environments. I have also converted a few non profile driven drupal sites into profile/make file driven ones that play well with Aegir.

I have strong HTML/CSS/JS skills and aim to produce clean, semantic, standards compliant code that powers beautiful, responsive, useable, accessible and functional web sites and systems.

I have intermediate PHP/MYSQL ability and a good understanding of when and how to use them to manipulate Drupals theme layer, to write simple custom modules and to manipulate and patch contrib modules.

I have an ongoing interest and developing experience working with Aegir to maintain and deploy drupal sites. I work primarily with the Barracuda Octopus Aegir deployment stack and I have developed an efficient workflow that I have been helping other Drupal shops to implement.

I enjoy working with mapping within Drupal and have experience working with google maps, open layers, leaflet and mapbox. I have an emerging interest in Data Viz and have done some charts and graphs dashboards type stuff using Drupal and I would like to continue to continue exploring the D3.js library further in this respect.

I am comfortable working on most flavours of linux from the command line and I am a competent enough systems administrator to manage most server setup, troubleshooting, optimizing and maintenance.

I also have years of experience animating and programming using Flash but now mostly use JS/CSS to accomplish similar objectives.

I am a Titanium Certified Developer and have interest and experience in native iphone app development using JS and the excellent Titanium API in conjunction with Drupal to create native mobile applications.

I tend to be more technically minded but am a very creative individual who also enjoys designing, animating, illustrating, writing, drawing and appreciating good design, useability and creativity.

Presentations & Community

I am interested in further increasing my open source community contributions, in particular to the Drupal community. Currently these consist of bug reporting in issue queues, contributing documentation, presentations at user groups and conferences and just general spreading drupal as a web solution.

2006 – I was invited and attended a month long UNESCO workshop for African Animators in Durban, South Africa
2007 – I presented a workshop for museum designers – Multimedia Museums – Cape Town
2010 – I attended and presented a case study in the Appify Drupal session at Drupalcamp Alberta
2010 – I attended and presented a session at the Pacific Northwest Summit in Vancouver
2011 – I attended Pacific Northwest Summit in Portland
2012 – I attended Drupalcon in Denver
2013 – I attended and presented an Aegir session and a Freelancer productivity session at Drupalcamp Alberta in Banff.
2013 – I attended and presented an Aegir session and a Freelancer productivity session at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Vancouver

I have also been actively involved in the Animation South Africa non-profit organisation and developed and voluntarily maintain their community website at http://www.animationsa.org since 2008. I was on the board of this organisation for a few years and support their efforts to grow animation in Southern Africa.

Interests

I live and work in the mountain town of Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. I am originally from Durban, South Africa
When I am not working I love to spend time with my wife and 2 daughters Autumn & Aurora.

I also enjoy the following stuff

Snowboard, Skate or Surf at every available opportunity
Reading books on technology, business, startups and entrepreneurship
Travelling to see new places and meet new people