Siimee™

February of 2023 to present

About Siimee

"Siimee is a social impact company committed to reforming the recruiting and hiring process by reducing the biases that often occur."

My Involvement

At Siimee, I filled many roles. As a Full Stack Web Developer, I engineered a series of features such as Login and Onboarding, creating and streamlining the Sign Up and Authentication process using JSON Web Tokens. I also contributed to Siimee's In Application Chat feature, specifically implementing its incremental privacy settings while in chat. I also finalized a series of Unit Tests utilizing the Ava Testing Suite, achieving 100% code coverage. Lastly, I also contributed to Siimee in a Research capacity, investigating and compiling data around recruiting and hiring platforms which contributed to our UX implementation.

Code PDX

April of 2023 to June of 2023

About Code PDX

"As a Code for America Brigade, we're part of a national network of civic-minded volunteers who contribute their skills toward using the web as a platform for local government and community service."

My Involvement

At Code PDX (formerly Code For PDX), I was involved in working on their PASS project. The PASS application utilizes Solid Data Pods as decentralized data stores to digitally archive documents for individuals in the PDX area who had recently found themselves housing insecure. While my time at Code PDX was brief, I contributed to their PASS project by implementing the secure transfer of sensitive client data from scanned Driver's License. In scanning the Driver's License's PDF417 barcodes into Solid Data Pods (utilizing the JavaScript version of the zxing barcode scanning library), this tool assisted PDX Social Workers with quickly and securely storing and retrieving sensitive but essential documents for those facing housing insecurity.

CityStats API

August of 2023 to February of 2024

About CityStats API

"CityStats is a REST API that allows users to easily access the latest and most up-to-date information about American cities and states."

Project Description

I wrote CityStats as a way of easily accessing essential statistics about American cities and states. While the US census has its own API, I found it unintuitive and decided to write my own version. Utilizing Python's Beautiful Soup Library, I created a series of web scraping scripts that grabbed data from public resources like Wikipeda and City Government Websites. These scripts are periodically run to update and populate an SQLite database, which is then served to the web via Fastify/NodeJS, Docker, and NGINX. Additionally I provided interactive Documentation utilizing the React Library. You can learn how to use CityStats here. The infrastructure serving CityStats to the World Wide Web is the Linode/Akamai Cloud.

Auther

December of 2023 to January of 2024

About Auther

"Auther is a Proof Of Concept project off of which to scaffold any application needing JWT authentication."

Project Description

Auther is a scaffolding project which demonstrates the basic concepts around authentication using JSON Web Tokens and 2 factor authentication using transactional emails. Meant to be put in front of any application, Auther aims to provide the basic features of authentication (sign up, login, forgot password, change password, delete profile) that users have come to expect to be a part of any modern day application.

Utilizing TypeScript, Fastify, VueJS, Redis, and PostGreSQL, Auther provides a demonstration of how to utilize JSON Web Tokens for modern day web applications. Note that Auther is meant only to be utilized as a Proof Of Concept (there are obviously far more robust authentication solutions that are more suitable for real world applications). Nevertheless this project demonstrates the essential logic common in authenticating using JSON Web Tokens.

brianhayes.dev

May of 2023 to Present

About This Website

"You're currently visiting my personal portfolio website and blog! Inspired in part by the minimalist style of Scribe, this site is meant to invite you to take a look at some of my humble works and perhaps read one of my blog posts on software and other topics."

Project Description

This website is actually in its third iteration, which strives to be more readable and minimal than the previous two. The last version of this website, titled "LeafBytes", can still be found here, kept online for purposes of posterity. The previous version had some nice CSS animations (and a fun CyberPunk theme! 😎).

Despite my fondness for this original version of my website, I quickly found myself wanting to rewrite it from scratch, as I had a more minimalistic design in mind and had learned to appreciate a more simple and clean approach.

Thusly, this latest version of my website is written in simple HTML, CSS, and a small amount of JavaScript (okay okay, I used PugJS instead of just pure HTML, but you get the idea 😉). It is running via an NGINX server hosted on an Akamai/Linode Cloud instance. All these icons you see can be credited to the awesome designers over at Iconify!

Welcome Traveler!

My name is Brian Hayes and you've somehow stumbled across my humble little corner of the web while journeying along! Thanks for taking a look around. I hope you like what you see so far 😗.

My Story

I've worn many hats in my short time on this small beautiful blue ball we call Earth, and I can tell you I've loved every role I've played. I've been a Son, a Student, a Teacher, an Artist, a Clerk, a Concierge, and an Athlete. The most recent hat I've put on has been that of a Programmer! Specifically that of a Full Stack Web Developer 😀!

Inspired by my best friend/mentor, I took up learning the ins and outs of all things computers a little over 3 years ago. In one of my past lives I was a Digital Artist, so learning to code wasn't completely alien to me as I had gained more than a basic familiarity with computers while working with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working as a Night Auditor at a prestigious hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. The Hotel Industry wasn't doing too well during that time for obvious reasons, so there was a lot of dead periods during my shifts. Thusly I would find myself, in the dead of night, having all my other tasks completed very early.

In those quiet periods, with my work done until our doors would open come sunrise, I would break out my laptop (installed with an obscure Linux distro), open up my NeoVim text editor (like a boss 😎), and slowly but surely...I taught myself to code (with lots of feedback from my best friend/mentor of course!).

As my journey into the code delved deeper, I would find myself just as engaged as when I was an Art Student... pouring over every detail, endeavoring to find the most natural, but also most efficient line. Computer Programming is probably the most challenging subject I've ever tried to tackle. That said, I have never backed away from a challenge, and have consistently devoted myself to always push forward, and become better than I was the day before at whatever skillset I have committed to learn. Computer Programming, and by extension, Web Development, has been, and continues to be, no different.

Where I Am Now

At the time of this writing (February of 2024), I am continuing to keep my skills sharp. Having recently completed my personal project CityStats, I am now preparing to brush up my Computer Science basics by diving deep into the subject of Data Structures and Algorithms. I am also researching essential topics to my field, reading the TCP/IP Guide from No Starch Press. Lastly I'm also planning my next personal project, a Two Player Video Game utilizing the WebSockets protocol, so keep an eye out for that in the future! 🙂

While you're here, I invite you to take a look at my resume if you're interested in working with me. Additionally, please feel free to peruse around , where you will find articles that document my learning journey. You can also reach out to me via any of the email/social media links found above and below!

Be Well, Traveler! ☮️