The Curriculum Vitae

Saturday 9th December 2023
Pertinacia, scientia et ventus
Since 1982 | Issue 9482
Voted #1 best ever C.V. in my head
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2023: The edition where everything got schmexy. Real schmexy. The author, wondering 'Eh?!'
  • Accessibility- and performance-focused senior frontend developer, consultant and interaction designer
  • 11 years agency, 4 years consultancy, 1 year public and some years private sector experience
  • Been around a while now, with over 20 years experience, 18+ years professional.

Bags of experience. Shed-loads of grit.

I literally keep it in bags. No jokes. Those tough, heavy-duty see-through ones that they put wood chippings in so you can see how the dust has settled. I line them up nicely to gaze fondly upon them from time to time. Ahhh, memories.

Exclusive By Phil Steer Careers correspondent

It looks like you're using screen reader software. Just to let you know that any link in this section will open in a new window or tab.

I'm an accessibility- and performance-focused senior frontend developer and interaction designer with a whole load of professional experience.

I'm currently working for AND Digital and previously for BPDTS within the Department for Work and Pensions, Plusnet, as well as totting up over 10 years digital agency experience, a bit of consulting, some technical project management, mentoring, presenting/speaking out loud to a room-or-so full of people about things I know something about, and being an all-round decent bloke.

I've worked on award-winning projects in my time. Once, I worked on something that almost won an EMMY too.

Remember to add some really motivational, disruptive, thoughtful (yet meaningful) words here for all to regard and cherish.

Phil Steer

I work well with others. I can even work alone, and I sometimes do my own thing too. You should probably hire me for things. I can help with things.

I have worked with all sorts of things over the years, including: MODX, Grav, Drupal, Shopify, Tumblr themes, React, static site generators (such as Eleventy, Astro, Gatsby, NextJS, Jekyll), lots of templating languages such as Nunjucks, JSX, Twig, Liquid, Smarty (way back in the day!), and I do the odd bit of plain ol' vanilla Javascript too.

I do know how to theme for Wordpress (but please don't ask me to - it's nasty).

An awkward portrait of the author, caught mid-guff, and feeling thoroughly disappointed about it. More on page 3 Photograph by Phil Steer

I can help you with

Phil Steer Business Development Manager

Accessibility

Making sure that the 20%+ people on this planet that you've been ignoring can actually give you their money when they want to. I specialise in writing accessible websites and am always striving to be even better. And better-er.

Front end performance

All that Google Core Web Vitals stuff you've been hearing about. Making your site faster, quicker, more-betterer. Everyone will thank you, since if you take too long about it they'll have gone and spent their money elsewhere after about 5-7 seconds anyway. What do you mean, "They've already gone"??!

General front end stuff

HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I'm not much of a JS framework/library kind of guy. I prefer to write vanilla JavaScript to progressively enhance a page, rather than write an entire page/site in JavaScript for no other reason than somebody once told you Facebook was written in React so that means it's always the right tool for the job. Because it's not. In fact, most of the time, it's not.

E-commerce

I do a bit of Shopify from time to time. It's loveleh. You will love it too. The only e-commerce platform I've ever used that I actually liked working with. That's really saying something.

Interaction design

It's like drawings of how stuff might work, then you test your ideas out to see if you're right. Then you do more drawings until you get it right and all the people understand how to use this thing you've drawn. Then you make...

Prototypes

A working drawing that's sometimes almost like a real website - but it's not. These are great when you do important things like user research and need people to have something tangible to click or tap to see if what you're trying to make is intuitive, logical and consistent. All the loveleh things.

Coding quality and standards

There's nothing I hate more than untidy, unkempt code. Actually, that's a lie. I really really REALLY hate mushrooms and brocolli. But, when it comes to web development, veg isn't really on the list. I like to help people write cleaner, nicer, more understandable and better documented code. Because otherwise your code is just grim vegetables.

Fast food evaluation

Provide me with, and I will evaluate and let you know whether or not any given cheeseburger or pizza is of a high enough standard. And if you think for a second I'm going to give "Hawaiian" the time of day, you've got another thing coming, sonny Jim.

Where you can find me

Phil Steer Social media manager

Code that I'm happy to share can be found on my GitHub account. There's plenty archived repositories on there from back in the day. Please don't hold them against me. My 'Business Facebook for Recruiters' profile is over on LinkedIn if you want to offer me a job without a spec or pay scale that doesn't even match any of my actual skills listed.

You'll find quasi-occasional swears, many historical bad opinions on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. Sometimes there'll be photography of cats and dogs and (very rarely) holidays on my Facebook Photos Instagram profile. Pinterest boards for when you want to see a bunch of stuff I saw that I liked. It's mostly t-shirts, furniture, and Keto diet recipes in all fairness.

My (non-console) games and achievements: Steam. You can also find me on PlayStation or XBOX too if that really puts water under your floating vessel. I play a bit of Overwatch, football, plenty of RPG type stuff like The Witcher, Skyrim, Dead Island, Assassin's Creed, Fallout, Starfield, etc. You get me. Those types of things. Games. Pew pew!

Accessibility Information

Phil Steer Accessibility expert

I've taken a lot of care to make everything on this site as accessible as is reasonable for everybody. I hope you never run into any issues using this site (or indeed any site I've created).

In the unfortunate event that you run into any problems with any part of this site, please contact me via one of the social options and let me know about the issue and what your web browsing set up is so I can try to replicate and fix the issue. I take a lot of pride in what I create, and accessibility is joint top of my list of "Things that are reyt important", so please let me know.

All colour combinations should pass at least WCAG2 AA standard for large and small text, and in many cases they should also pass at AAA standard for large text. If you spot a colour combination that fails - let me know so I can take a look!

I'm working hard to make sure this is also accessible to WCAG3 APCA colour contrast standards as well, but it might not be quite there at the moment.

Privacy & Cookies

Phil Steer

Privacy is important, especially on the Internet where there are people who want to steal your identity and live in your skin. Or is it the other way around? Fortunately for you, I am not one of those people.

I only use cookies for satiation and in the case of needing to set any user or theme preferences or, stupidly, the fact you accept cookies from this site. Yes, you read that right. I have to save a cookie to say you're happy for me to save cookies. Thanks, GDPR!

Right now though, you're safe from this Fresh Hell because I don't need to ask you about chocolate chip biscuits at all. I'm not even using an analytics package on here. Or trackers. Or advertising. IIJWII.

If you spot anything that makes you think otherwise, let me know and I'll get it looked into. I don't need your personal data, and I don't want it.