Desmond Duval has been a Technologist of some form or other for more than 15 years. An early job in helpdesk allowed a pivot into IT work while building academic programming skills, and a series of entrepreneurial adventures afforded a view of managing live code in the real world. Around 2019 I shifted focus to IT Administration & Network Design and Administration, developing a 7-site complete network rebuild, replacing all consumer routing equipment with professional equipment, and implementing transparent hub-and-spoke VPN, all for just over $3000.
Outside of my IT and Networking experiences, I've continued building my programming skills, expanding into Web Development as needed for my entrepreneurial attempts and IT responsibilities. With a focus on accessibility guidelines and performance metrics, I have the most experience in (respectively) Javascript, Dart, and PHP with regard to full stack languages, but have a broad enough experience with languages that there's not much I can't work in so long as I can access Google along the way. I'll always produce the cleanest patterns in my favored languages, but I've often found flexibility to be more useful than sterility when it comes to time-critical projects.
These days, most of my web development is in vanilla Javascript, with PugJS and Stylus providing pre-processor support for static HTML and CSS. In my own projects, I prefer to code without frameworks, so that I have stronger control over the optimization options on the final project. That said, I've a passing familiarity with Wordpress, Drupal, and React, just haven't had a reason yet to dive in to really grok them. I like a challenge and an excuse to build a new skill, so even if something doesn't sound up my alley, I'm always willing to give ideas a listen.
Here's to the next 15 years,
Desmond
