Jesse Mills

Web Development

For some examples of my skill (besides this beautiful, beautiful site):

Frontenac News Redesign (project link)

Redesigned with accessibility in mind. Not just for those with visual impairments, but also those living with shoddy Internet (common in Frontenac), and seniors using ancient browsers out of familiarity.

I reduced the average page size by over 85% across most of the site, it's compatible back to IE8, works without javascript, and has an accessible font size without any extra configuration.

The site's frontend is almost entirely custom code written for the specific needs of the Frontenac News, and the backend is mostly managed by the CMS except for a custom plugin that clears the cache for specific pages when they're modified.

Using some javascript tricks, the site provides dynamic content like rotating ads and suggested stories on pages that are completely cached, without making AJAX calls. That last bit is important on satellite internet connections where the latency is so bad that by the time you've loaded an ad you've already scrolled past it. There is also a fallback if Javascript is not available.

Technologies used: PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Regex, Joomla, Cloudflare.

Asterios Kills a Kid(project link)

As a passion project, I had a lot of leeway in designing this site which allowed me to experiment a lot. For example: the Frontenac News project used the CMS Joomla and was written in PHP, this one used the static site generator Hugo and was templated in GO.

Changes were made locally, and then pushed to the site using git as a publishing mechanism. The result was not only a blazing fast website, but one that was incredibly secure.

Since it was a mock-childrens-advice-podcast, I illustrated all of the graphics. Then, because they're sharper and smaller file size when compressed, I posted them as SVGs (with png fallbacks of course). To keep the site performant on mobile (because SVG files can cause screen tearing when scrolling) I wrote custom javascript to rasterize the images on load.

Technologies used: Hugo, HTML, CSS, Javascript, GO, Git.

Other Projects

Here's a taste of some other web and programming projects I've worked on.

• B's Radical Rides website
• ASCII Game Engine: Designed for creating side-scrolling RPGs, this engine runs and renders entirely in the Windows command console. My first real programming project.
• Frontenac News Event Managing Software: Saved hours of labour per week by consolidating two jobs: entering events into our website and formatting events for print. Technologies used: C#, MySql, Winforms, Regex

Video Production

Before a career shift I made a living doing video work. I still freelance occasionally and below are a few examples of my work:

• St. Lawrence Employment Centre - Second Career: I created this video for the St. Lawrence Employment Centre in Sharbot Lake. One challenge I faced was how to boil four in depth interviews down to a single minute, without losing the heart of their individual stories.
• Polar Bear Plunge: I was tasked with creating a promotional video for the Polar Bear Plunge, an event at Central Frontenac's annual Heritage Festival. I had, however, a limitation: I could only work with images from past events.
• Animation for the film "Light of My Eyes": The story is about a lonely tree that makes friends with a bird, narrated and written by 11-year-old Zahra.
• The Cobra Dance: For my final project of my first year at Ryerson University, I was to create a film adaptation of something that had never been adapted before. My group chose a poem by Laura-Aldir Hernandez, "The Cobra Dance". This was the finished product, shot on 16mm film.

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