Gabe da Silveira

I just left my fulltime position as the primary architect, designer, and developer for the the Twin Cities Student Unions of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campuses. I'm looking for web design / development opportunities in the Santa Fe area effective September 15^th, 2005.

Strengths

I combine exceptional technical skill with a keen design sense and the ability to find the ideal cost-benefit balance. My understanding of the web runs from low-level server and protocol details through idiosyncrasies of various browsers, usability, information architecture, all the way up to the top-level strategies driving development. I enjoy working directly with clients to assess needs, develop specifications, and make sure projects meet both technical and business goals. I regularly use my communication skills to bridge the gap between Marketing and IT.

Technical Proficiencies

Accomplishments

I manage everything from the highest level web strategies down the smallest details of markup and code. Over the years I have proposed and implemented several initiatives directly saving thousands of staff hours, increasing customer satisfaction, and putting our websites on the bleeding edge of academic web development. My library of personal code ramps up productivity without sacrificing quality, and is available free of charge to my employer.

Templation

A lightweight and powerful template engine developed to ease maintenance of large websites without restrictions on programmers or designers. Templation provides tremendous flexibility with extremely minimal conceptual overhead. Documenting this is my summer project, at which point it will be released as free software under the GPL.

Student Groups Database

Registering and advising student groups is one significant task my department performs, however the old system was not meeting staff or student needs effectively. After informal conversations with some of the affected staff, I proposed a new in-house solution to completely replace the outsourced database. In the first year the average time to register decreased from 10 days to 1 day, group enrollment doubled, staffing costs were decreased, and the public information was instantly updated instead of nightly updates.

Events Calendar

The University of Minnesota events calendar was lacking in several key areas. After reviewing several pre-packaged solutions, I spec'ed out a customized Events Calendar for our department. Now on its third revision, the calendar has far surpassed anything existing on other University of Minnesota websites.

University of Minnesota Standard Templates

Several years ago the University of Minnesota commissioned a set of HTML templates to be provided free of charge to all departments. I rewrote these templates using CSS instead of tables for layout, decreasing the code size significantly while providing full graphic compatibility for IE 5, 5.5, 6, Mac IE 5, Netscape 6+, Safari, and Opera, and increasing accessibility for alternative browsers.

HappyForm

HappyForm is a straightforward library that reduces the process of creating persistent, validated, database-stored forms into a simple specification that can easily be written by with no PHP or HTML knowledge. Having written hundreds of forms for our websites, this code encapsulates all my best practices so that full-featured forms can now be written easier than the barebones error-prone forms so common today.

Education

BS Computer Science (Summer 2005), University of Minnesota.