About
Hi! I'm James Beninger, the developer behind Plaintext.
I've been developing software systems professionally for two decades. I've worked everywhere from small local software shops to the Canadian Government, and my most recent title was Senior Developer at TripAdvisor.
Since April 2016, I've been a freelance software engineer and consultant.
What I Do
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Full-Stack Development
Tend software projects from inception through to deployment, from the level of isolated components to full systems. -
Systems Integration
Take information from one system, transform it, integrate it, and display it in another. Software systems work better when they talk to each other. -
Data Processing
Collect, filter, and transform data from multiple systems to extract the useful data that might otherwise be missed.
What Have I Been Up To Lately?
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WordPress, SilverStripe, and Shopify Plugins
Existing frameworks and plugins usually do 90% of what's needed, but there's always that one cloud-based service that hasn't released any plugins, that one admin feature that doesn't already exist in the framework. In the past year I've written plugins for multiple frameworks that handle everything from content-moderation to video-editing. -
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Apps
Social media apps can provide integration beyond simple Like buttons or displaying Twitter feeds. Apps can provide "Login With Facebook" buttons, collect posts with specific tags, or notify users through their social media accounts. I'm currently working on a project that does all three. -
Plain Old Web Development
Everything above is the "fun stuff", but ultimately it's usually displayed through a plain old browser. So I definitely do my fair share of plain old web development, starring HTML, CSS, Javascript, and whatever frameworks my clients are using at the time.
Technologies
For a full list of the alphabet-soup of technologies I've worked with over the years, visit my LinkedIn Page, but here's what I've been using recently:- Web development and related frameworks - HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, Gulp, Sass
- LAMP-stack systems - Linux, Apache, PHP/Python, MySQL, all wrapped in Docker machines for easy testing
- Java - Servlets and CLI applications
- Linux-based Server management - Setup, Backups, and Health Monitors, mostly managed through Amazon Web Services
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