The portfolio of front end developer Mike Byrne

I have 15 years experience specialising in building semantic, accessible, pixel perfect websites, using and pushing todays best practice methods. I seek to produce graceful, pragmatic solutions to solve interface problems presented to me. Over the years I have developed a reputation for straight talking, working very quickly, adaptability, being client friendly and leading both developers and whole teams towards a successful project.

Primary skills:

CSS/SCSS
HTML, xHTML and HTML5
JavaScript
FE architecture
Browser compatibility
Browser performance
Mentoring
Prototyping
Responsive websites

Experience with:

JSON, XML, SVG
PHP, Ruby on Rails
Presenting/teaching
Source control in SVN and Git
Task runners - Gulp and Grunt
SEO
Localisation
Accessibility
UX

Key Engagements

ESPN
July 2013 - August 2014, AREA 17
🏆 🏆 🏆 🏆
AREA 17 were engaged by ESPN to help redesign their website which receives up to 80 million visitors a month and handles 8,000 new pieces of content a day. Initially I was involved with redesign ideas generation - giving advice based on my experience as a developer with a keen interest in browser performance. This moved on to creating prototypes to demonstrate and refine ideas.
Ultimately this led to being embedded within the ESPN developer team in Bristol, Connecticut, to help guide and direct realising and develop the new designs from the front line. This involved integrating with the FE team lead by David Ashton, the BE team lead by Keith Lam, the design team lead by Dan Benshoff and the product team lead by Jarrod Schwarz and Dheerja Kaur.
The relaunched ESPN looks fantastic and I'm really warmed to still be able to spot my influence and my code within its pages.
Charlie Rose
April 2016, AREA 17
The video archive of the now disgraced Charlie Rose, an American talk show host who had been interviewing people for 25+ years and appeared on America’s most popular morning TV show. Known for his frank interviews with celebrities and politicians, and now, sadly, the sexual harassment of some of his employees.
This site was a personal favorite as I was the lead front end developer on the project; my involvement spanning from design, to build to post launch support and site maintenance. And now it sits in a peculiar place. We cannot deny his body of work but also we cannot condone his actions.
The biggest shame was his team of dedicated employees, who, from my experience, where smart, creative and thoroughly professional and in all honesty, a total pleasure to work with. Shouts to Xarissa Holdaway in particular.
Some stand out interviews for me are President Obama, George W. Bush, Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, the late Niki Lauda and my hero, Lewis Hamilton.
This relaunched version of charlierose.com had double the traffic and people stayed four times longer than the original.
Apple
August - October 2014
Working within the Apple marcom team in Sunnyvale, California and Cupertino, California supporting 2014's biggest Apple product launches. Within my team I established a reputation for going beyond the required, doing whatever it takes to deliver and being very designer friendly. I like to think I brought energy, enthusiasm and some much needed British humor to the group.
The key challenges here lay with adapting to working within marcom's (at the time) new responsive web strategy, whilst simultaneously also working on legacy marketing sites with frequent direction changes and a tiny timescale. Quickly becoming familiar with their internal methods, bug tracking systems while all the time maintaining a very high attention to detail.
Whilst there it was my great pleasure to meet and be inspired by Andrew Hedges, Abraham Velázquez, Ludwig Wendzich and many others.