Tag Archives: experience

About Me

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Me!

Me!

Hi. I’m Sam Cleaver, a second year student at Coventry University in Electronic Engineering. I’m also a web developer with almost 8 years experience in programming. I can code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX (jQuery), Perl, PHP, MySQL in addition to server system administration. I used to live in Hemel Hempstead (now mostly Coventry) I went to The Cavendish School where I studied the usual core subjects and in addition to them, German at GCSE level and then I.T and Design & Technology: Product Design at A-Level.

I have been active in the web community for a long time now, most commonly on forums such as NamePros and DevShed where I post problems as well as most commonly answering them ;) . There have been various exciting projects I have worked on over the years, from creating my own content management systems to creating entire websites as Twerq and FetchMP3.

I am a determined individual that very rarely gives up on anything, even when tasks seem almost impossible, *cough* fetchmp3′s flv retrieval system *cough*.  I take a good approach to problem solving and never have a problem trying to take a completely different approach to a problem if it results in a faster resolution. I work well in teams and often find that by delegation and finding peoples strengths and weaknesses a very effective team is not very hard to establish at all no matter what the task ahead is.

In addition to my freelance web developer work and studying at University, I also work at Debenhams providing great customer service to everyone! :-D

Oh and check out the links below for my facebook, last.fm, twitter etc etc!

If you have any questions just leave a comment here or contact me via the contact form here.

Twerq

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I worked on Twerq roughly three years ago now and it has been one of the biggest projects I’ve undertaken to date. At its core Twerq enables users to very easily search and find multiple items all in one go. It was one of the first services to “mashup” content, pulling together videos, images and text to help the user to find all the information they could possibly need on a specified search term. In addition to regular searches it also parses rss feeds on some of the worlds most popular news sources such as the BBC, Reuters and CNN.

It features repeat searching, bulk searching, mashups, rss feeds. For me the biggest challenge in this project was creating it so it was both scalable and as feature packed as it could possibly be. Search engine API’s were used a lot in the construction of the project, Google, Yahoo etc. For those items that did not feature API’s I had to use a technique called page scraping or “data mining” to retrieve the desired information for processing. To make this process even more efficienct I implemented caching to reduce bandwidth and overall load on the server.

Unlike FetchMP3, a more recent project, Twerq was not put through a formal closed beta test phase, instead we thoroughly tested at each stage of development to ensure that all was functioning as should be before a public beta.

This website required a combination of skills including:

  • XHTML/CSS (WC3 valid)
  • PHP/MySQL
  • Additional Server Module Installation for PHP and Apache etc
  • Javascript/AJAX (jQuery library)

Twerq has so many features it would be impossible to explain them all here so check it out at http://www.twerq.com.