Silverland Inn & Suites

silverlandusa.com

Silverland Inn & Suites website showcases Specials, Rooms and Suites, Hotel Amenities, Groups and Events, and a City Guide for the primary goal of generating hotel bookings.

Full Stack Developer Role

• Created Photoshop wireframes for the graphic designer to apply the visual design.
• Front-end development of the design utilizing the blueprint CSS framework.
• Used jQuery and jQuery UI libraries to integrate the datepicker widget and form validation into the Reservation form.
• Integrated PHP scripts to interact with the 3rd party booking API used by the reservation form.
• Relational database design and back-end development of the Special Offers module. This central application was used to create and display scheduled special offers through a RESTful API built with the CakePHP framework. The XML response was handled by PHP's built in SimpleXML class.
• Relational Database design and back-end development of the City Guide module. This module was a part of the same system that the Special Offers module was built upon. Incorporated the Google Maps API to display brick and mortar establishments within a pre-defined radius centered on the location of Silverland Inn & Suites.

Production Manager Role

• Responsible for delegating tasks to team members in expediting the completion of the website.
• Oversaw periodic website updates that was delegated to team members.
• Performed quality assurance tasks related to the launch of the site.

Challenges

• Most websites had a similar structure and a repetitive code base. I have discovered and introduced frameworks to reduce the build-out time and cost the website.
• One of the challenges associated with blueprint CSS is making sure the final design aligned perfectly with the 24 column grid structure. To solve this problem I overlay the grid on top of the wireframe before handing it off to the Graphic Designer. This process made it easy to slice pixel perfect graphics from the final design to code.
• At the time CakePHP was one of the most regarded frameworks and I had no knowledge of Object Oriented Programming or the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. Learning the framework required extensive use of their documentation and writing the code I needed to complete the Special Offers and City Guide Modules.

What I Have Learned

• I learned that incorporating frameworks into my workflow can cut development time down. I also learn that its important to know why and how the framework works so troubleshoot or customize the application the way you want to.
• I learned the MVC design pattern including how Routing and URL Rewriting works. Models are used for modeling data which is then passed into the controllers and then output to the View. Controllers are also used to pass input into the Models. The purpose of the pattern is to organize logic, data, and output so that your code base is easier to manage and maintain.
• I learned how PHP Classes work including public and private methods and properties and how to access them.
• As a production manager, I learned that team members have their own ways of doing things and I learned to have an open mind.