Work Projects

At NewCity, I develop web applications and front-end interfaces for large websites, primarily for clients in the higher-education sector. I’ve worked with dozens of institutions, from regional schools to internationally recognized universities.

Featured Projects

Here are a few projects I’d like to highlight:

CalArts (California Institute of the Arts)

I built the front end for the CalArts website. It won an award!

As you might imagine, the designer set a high bar on this one; he wrote an article about it, in case you’re interested. On my end, the main challenge was translating some very complex visual concepts into a modular library of reusable components. Overlapping elements, bizarre shapes and patterns, an aesthetic of randomness... how do you systematize a design that’s intended to look unsystematic? How do you keep it all user-friendly and accessible? It wasn’t easy, but it was certainly rewarding.

Gainsboro History Project

Gainsboro is a historically African American neighborhood in Roanoke, Virginia. As a Roanoker myself, I was delighted to develop the Gainsboro History Project app, which documents the district’s rich past. The client was the Roanoke Higher Education Center.

I built this as a progressively enhanced static site using Next.js and content sourced from a headless WordPress instance. It’s snappy and stylish, and it boasts some nice features, including:

an interactive Leaflet map that can track your location among landmarks as you walk through historic Gainsboro (if you happen to be there);
a “favorites” functionality for flagging articles of interest using the browser’s local storage;
and a search page powered by Algolia.

The Long 19th Amendment Project Portal (Harvard)

The Long 19th Amendment Project Portal is the digital centerpiece of the Long 19th Amendment Project, a collaboration between the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library for the centennial of the 19th Amendment. The portal is a website featuring essays, exhibits, and teaching materials on the history of women’s suffrage in America, as well as a searchable Collections database.

The most challenging part of my work on this project was building the front and back end of the Collections feature. It’s a fairly complex React/Redux app, with an Express server and MongoDB database. The CRUD functionality was particularly tricky: database-records can have dozens of fields of widely varying types, so the forms and data-validation were elaborate; also, I was responsible for developing a bulk-import mechanism via CSV-upload.

This one holds a special place in my heart. The problem-solving was a blast, the site itself is content-rich and educational, and I’m proud to have played a central role on such a meaningful project.

More Apps and Microsites

We Are Land-Grant microsite for Oklahoma State University, built with Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and GSAP;
Interactive map component for Rutgers–New Brunswick, built with React, Redux Toolkit, TypeScript, Zod, and Leaflet;
Doing Business North America for Arizona State University, built with React;
Future of Health microsite for Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Framer Motion.

Front-End Work for Large-Scale Sites

Over several years, I’ve iterated on a “starter kit” for scaffolding the front end of large-scale websites. It’s not a rigid boilerplate, but rather a flexible foundation for building Twig components in an isolated Storybook environment. It currently leverages:

Docker, TypeScript, and Vite, for a consistent, safe, and robust developer experience;
MDX, to promote good documentation practices;
Tailwind CSS with some out-of-the-box configuration to facilitate color-theming and vertical rhythm;
GitLab CI/CD, for automated testing and deployment.

The starter kit has significantly reduced repository-setup time. It’s also brought consistency to our website projects, which improves maintainability. Crucially, it’s CMS-agnostic, and it’s seen integrations in WordPress, Drupal, Cascade, Ingeniux, and Modern Campus (off the top of my head).

Below is a non-exhaustive list of more live sites that feature my front-end work. It’s in roughly reverse-chronological order of my most significant contributions. I was the primary front-end developer for all sites except for those marked with an asterisk; for those with an asterisk, I either collaborated with other developers or did substantial work after the site was already launched.