About Me

My name is Justin Smith, and I am a Software Developer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am grateful to be a professional working in a career that I feel passionately about.

There is a reason this page is the home page for my site - I believe that in order to understand my work, my resume, or anything else you may view here, you first have to understand me and how my appetite for knowledge has influenced my life.

Software Development is as much a hobby of mine as it is a career. Working for someone and helping them bring their vision to life has been a good experience so far, but I want something more - I want the experience and the know-how to bring my own visions to life. I want to be able to take one of my side projects and turn it into something truly great. I enjoy helping other people bring their technological imaginations to life, but in order for me to achieve my ultimate goal, I need to learn how to imagine my own creations. This ultimate goal I speak of is to change the world; I want to make Earth a better place to live through technology. Even though a Bachelor's degree might be good enough for a programmer, no one has yet to tell me what kind of degree I would need to help the world. I feel that learning is something that one can never be finished with, and in order to achieve what I aspire, I want to stay fresh and broaden my horizons, while at the same time deepening the skills with which I am already accustomed.

I am currently a working professional, doing back-end PHP development for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I have a wealth of experience in development of web-based technologies, but my favorite languages are C++ and Android. I like to find ways to improve things; do things in different ways or do things that may not be so ordinary.

Since this site is built in PHP and much of the backend cannot be seen, you can continue reading for a brief summary of the work I put into it.

I have been developing this site from scratch for the last few months. It is my biggest project to date. I use complete URL routing across the site in order to make the links as easy to read as possible. Every piece of content you see on this site other than the banner and the social links at the bottom, is dynamic content originating from a MySQL database. Other than a few jQuery functions and the syntax highlighting on the portfolio pages, every piece of code on this site came from hours of research, design and development. All graphics on this site were made by me. The only exceptions would come from graphics associated with projects in my Portfolio. Some of those graphics I make, some I borrow (only to be used non-commercially). The site's design is partially liquid, but I would not recommend viewing it on a mobile device. My biggest challenge in developing this website was how to design it. I spent long days wracking my brain trying to formulate a good design. The second biggest challenge was designing the portfolio pages. I wanted any visitor to be able to get a glimpse into my projects, even though many of them are very short and/or book exercises. However, I did not want the portfolio pages to be too cluttered or disorganized. Just like me and my projects, this site is a work in progress.