Joel Birch

Web Developer & Designer

profile

Originally a self-taught designer, my craving for new tools to master lead full circle back to a childhood interest: coding. The web standards movement of the mid-2000s presented a perfect opportunity to meld proven design chops with this rediscovered passion. The death of the Flash platform had left design agencies struggling to create rich, cross-browser web experiences, so I quickly took over all website development at the advertising agencies I freelanced at, resulting in a firehose of client websites to build with ever-increasing feature complexity.

I live and thrive in the space between creative and technical minds, facilitating the smooth communication of ideas between the two groups. I love the constant learning necessary to be able to provide, in effect, a turnkey digital solution for agencies that otherwise couldn't offer professional web services to their clients.

If I had to choose my most valuable and defining feature it would be my drive to learn. I recently learnt to ride a motorcycle, cut my own hair and complete the Rubix Cube (admittedly not all in the same day). My very minor “internet fame” comes from developing the ubiquitous Superfish dropdown menu plugin during the early days of the jQuery boom.

Experience

Full Stack Web Developer

Joel Birch Design | 02/2015 - PRESENT

Full Stack/Front-end Web Developer

Grant Day James and Hubink (design and advertising agencies) | 01/2008 - 09/2014

Graphic Designer

Grant Day James | 04/2004 - 02/2008

Graphic Designer

The Design Department | 07/1997 - 09/2003

Art Director

Singletons Advertising | 10/1998 - 11/1998

Graphic Designer

Village Roadshow Exhibition | 03/1996 - 05/1997

Apprentice Compositor/Prepress

Horse Deals Magazine | 02/1995 - 03/1996

Projects

Ode of Toorak

Fortis Development Group

Superfish Dropdown Menu jQuery Plugin

Open Source

BattleFX roleplaying battle effects tracker

Side project

Skills

General

Front-end web development
Back-end web development
UX Design
Graphic Design
eDM templates
Written Communication
Teaching
Test-Driven Development
DNS and server management

Languages

HTML/WAI-ARIA
CSS/BEM/Sass/PostCSS
JavaScript/ECMAScript
SVG
CLI/Zsh/Bash
PHP
Regular Expressions
Adobe ExtendScript
Twig/Pug/Blade/Handlebars
TDD with Jest, Jasmine, etc
Ruby

Frameworks

React
Vue
Angular
Node/NPM
Gatsby static site generator
WordPress
Laravel PHP Framework
Cypress Visual Testing
jQuery
Tailwind CSS
Hucssley Utility CSS
Timber Library for WordPress
NPM tasks/Gulp/Webpack
Ruby on Rails

Software

Adobe Creative Suite
Git Version Management
VS Code
Netlify CLI
SpinupWP

Databases

FirebaseMySql

Education

Victorian Certificate of Education

Monbulk High School

1987 - 1992

Ongoing

Curiosity

1974 -