Nathan de Vries

About Me

By day I can be found forging web & mobile applications, and by night you'll find me cycling around town, seeking out great live music & foreign delicacies.

I have a passion for sweating the details and ensuring that user-experience is a priority over all else. Not to mention having fun in what I do!

The tools of my trade are a trusty Macbook Pro, Photoshop, the Ruby on Rails framework, and hand-crafted standards compliant HTML/CSS & behavioral Javascript with Prototype.

On the odd occasion, you'll find me with my nose in XCode working on both native and Mobile Safari based iPhone applications.

On the Web

Trying to find me on the web? The most obvious destination is my blog, although you can also find me tweeting a thought or two, knocking out open source code, listening to music, taking photos and producing videos.

For those of you after details of my professional experience and skills/specialties, a detailed copy of my resumé can be found on LinkedIn.

At Work

Interested in bringing me on board with your project, but want to see what I'm capable of first? I thought you might ask, so here are a couple of the projects I've worked on.

1. Storyz

   
   The Storyz project gave me the opportunity to get my teeth sunk into the mobile space, since the social media sharing service intends to work seamlessly from a web browser, Facebook, iPhones, basic WAP phones, Java-enabled devices and a whole range of other platforms.
   As the technical architect & lead server developer, I was responsible for everything from requirements elicitation & specification, through to building the final solutions. I worked extensively with the iPhone, Android & J2ME platform, SMS sending, Amazon's scalable web services, and a wide range of other bleeding edge technologies..

2. Superwoman Financial Services

   
   Superwoman was looking to empower their passionate customers, by providing them with a platform to tell their friends about the company and its' services. This project involved building a community website where "Superwomen" could submit articles outlining their experience using the service. The project also included the development of a custom webmail solution to provide each customer of Superwoman with a superwoman.com.au email address.

3. NSW Government Business Licence Information Service

   
   The BLIS project was one of the more major projects I worked on during my time at Squiz. Squiz's content management system, MySource Matrix, needed some custom development to support the hundreds of thousands of licenses that needed to be available through BLIS. I was responsible for the custom development required to support the license content, and also for migrating the hundreds of thousands of legacy licenses over to the CMS.

4. Triple M

   
   Squiz was responsible for maintaining a number of Austereo domains, including Triple M & 2 Day FM. Each of these websites were using the MySource Matrix CMS, but were interested in using their web content in rich HTML emails sent to their subscriber lists. I built the email system responsible for performing mail-merge style email marketing campaigns, based on content already available in the customer's CMS. This system has now become a core feature of the MySource Matrix CMS.

5. Duck New Media

   
   Duck New Media was a company I co-founded back in 2006, enabling companies to leverage new-media techniques in order to market their businesses online. The company is still humming along nicely in the hands of one of the original founders.

6. Squiz.net MySource Matrix

   
   On the MySource Matrix develoment team, we liked to "eat our own dogfood". Why spend every hour of the day building a CMS you're not going to use yourself? We built the website to form a central repository of documentation, downloads, how-tos & tips for both ourselves and our customers.

7. Papia Foods Online

   
   Papia was somewhat of an experiment among friends. It was an online store, selling fresh Greek produce such as nuts, cheeses & dolmades. The site was powered by jadedPixel's Shopify platform, and was featured on the Shopify blog. The Papia project was also a way for us to experiment with integrating the Shopify platform with DabbleDB, an online database system.

8. Mailguard

   
   The Mailguard project involved taking their existing website and re-cutting it to allow for easier maintenance and integration into a range of content management systems. It was transformed from a heavily HTML table-based layout into a more maintainable, standards compliant structure.