Blake Simmons Email & Phone Number

Powhatan, Ar, Us

Jonesboro, Arkansas, United States

Jonesboro, Arkansas, United States

Moving to this position in our university IT department broadened my development scope and eliminated my "content" related duties. Here, I joined a small team consisting of a few senior PHP developers and a handful of graduate assistants looking to learn. Our development team's main responsibilities were to maintain and create web applications. The scope of applications ranged from legacy applications, sometimes running on Windows servers, to more modern, Laravel-based applications running on a more commonly used web stack. These applications are commonly used by our end-users in their day-to-day tasks. As the only team on campus with the sole duty of web development, we were involved in the project lifecycle starting with the idea, and continuing on through the support/maintenance stage. Our "clients" were from all over campus, including administrators, institutional research, tutoring services, as well as other departments within IT. When not actively tackling a "client" project (a real rarity! 🙂), we took the opportunity to re-work and improve our applications and tooling.During my tenure in this position, our team simplified our application development framework by streamlining our dependencies. We also migrated away from using more heavy front-end libraries, preferring to use tools like TailwindCSS and AlpineJS instead. These changes, combined with our team onboarding additional developers with drive to use modern web development practices, allowed us to replace a third-party vendor with an in-house created and supported web application, saving the university a considerable amount of money each year. We also pushed forward our university's use of a single sign-on system, which dramatically helps the workflows of our faculty, staff, and students as they switch between applications throughout their day.Overall, the core principal of our team was to create modern, user-friendly applications with the goal of making everyone's life easier across campus.

Jonesboro, Arkansas, United States

As a front-end developer for the Digital Creative Media team, I maintained the front-end (and some back-end) code for the main university website. Similar to my previous role at Arkansas State, I created and modified features to ensure easier use for our campus community. Under the direction of more folks with an artistic eye than myself, I would create templates and page layouts that both fit the university style guide and worked with our in-use styles and content. In addition to my development responsibilities, I also coordinated and assisted users with site content, ranging from updating text and images, to inspecting and addressing accessibility issues.

Paragould, Arkansas, United States

During my time at Flower Shop Network, I was given the opportunity to work with a great development team. Other than tackling bugs that were reported by our internal users as well as our customers, my main focus was working with a sub-team on components critical to the internationalization of the business, including timezones and currency.

Jonesboro, Ar

Originally hired to help assist migrating content from an old site to the new, shortly after starting my position I offered to resolve a few front-end related issues with the new site that was not addressed originally. After proving to be an asset to the team beyond the scope of my original job, I was shifted into more of a support and developer role. I developed features and "widgets" using our CMS's backend templating language (Velocity), CSS, and Javascript in an effort to simplify site operations and fit the needs of our campus community. Within the confines of the CMS, I was able to provide the ability for non-technical people to add and create "link" entries, with multiple cross-references, that would then be grouped by first letter, alphabetically and shown on a page as the "A-Z Index".

Strawberry, Ar

Working with a community member skilled in web design and Photoshop, I helped re-launch the school district's website with a fresh look, providing more features to parents and students while helping cement a cohesive brand identity for the district. One of the core features of the site was for parents and students to sign up to a notification system letting them know of school closures in the case of inclement weather.

Strawberry, Ar

Maintained computer labs and various campus computers. Archived old documents via digital means.