Hi! My name is Stephen Ferris. I'm a web developer by day, and a stand-up comedian by night. I also sleep. Welcome to my web development portfolio!
I originally created this as a single page back in 2011 when I was looking for work then. Now, 14 years later, I'm looking for work again, so I've resurrected that page and morphed it into a Wordpress powered blog with a whole separate page that highlights my favorite projects that I've worked on over the years.
One day, back in 1999, a kid from Australia suggested I make a website for a club that I had created at school. I used to play computer games online using a service called GameRanger, which at the time was exclusive to the Macintosh platform, and that service was run by a man out of Australia named Scott Kevill, so a lot of people from Australia used it. Anyway, I found a really enjoyed the experience. I didn't know any code then, I just used Adobe PageMill of all things, but already at the age of 17, I was very much into trying to push the limits of what you could do graphically. I made some pretty elaborate designs in Photoshop, and skillfully cut them up in such a way that I could map them out on a table layout in PageMill.
Eventually I moved on to Dreamweaver when I took a multimedia class my senior year and learned some HTML and CSS. For some reason, although I had been skilled at math in the past, I didn't have the confidence to go beyond that and learn any real code until I'd been going to community college for a while. When I finally did take a course on Javascript and Perl, I couldn't believe how much sense it actually made! I felt like a fool. The summer after that, I even thought myself PHP. With those skills, I was able to do some solid freelance work for a couple of years, and then landed a position with a small web development company called i-Tul Design & Software. This is where the nickname dev914 comes from. My phone extension was 914, and all the developer phone extensions started with 9, so I fantasized that I was the 914th developer, even though this was highly unlikely at such a young, small company. It's far more likely I was the 14th or 15th developer.
Flora Fresh Inc is a florist and floral supplier. We build them a marketing and ecommerce site using WordPress and WooCommerce, with our own custom design, and a special product import API integration. I had the responsibility of maintaining and updating this site, which included evolving the product import system, making changes to the way […]
Now called Jiva Health, Contra Costa Sleep Center is a clinic helping people with sleeping disorders such as sleep apnea. They have a variety of different rooms and devices that they use to track your sleep and diagnose your needs. I was the lead for this client, responsible for handling communication, support requests, and new […]
Relationship Tracker Pro was a website where actors and agents in the film industry could connect and keep tabs on their relationships by posting who they worked with on projects as well as workshops and social events. While working at i-Tul, I also built a strong relationship with this client, helping to improve and evolve […]
City Lights is an independent bookstore and publishing company based in San Francisco, CA. We build them a marketing and eCommerce site starting with WordPress and the WooCommerce system, with our own custom design, and a custom inventory tracking system that integrates with both Igram and Wordstock APIs. This was a team effort, and I […]
Pacwest Furniture is a company that makes all kinds of furniture, from sofas to arm chairs, and beds. They already had a marketing site that we maintained, but they also wanted a system for tracking production as their products moved down the assembly line. I worked on many different parts of this project, and played […]
The Aesthetic Blueprint was a marketing and educational resource, geared towards advancing the field of plastic surgery through a series of videos and keynote speeches at conventions across the country. The site was built around a custom WordPress and OpenCart integration, featuring a video subscription model, and accreditation. I was the lead developer on this […]
FlipSidez is a company that sells flip flop shoes with custom CNC cut designs in the soles, so that when you walk down the beach, your footprints leave a copy of the design as you go. While working at i-Tul, this was one of my first projects as lead developer. In fact, I wrote nearly […]
Lock N Roll is a manufacturer of unique automotive trailer hitches and accessories. The site is an integration of WordPress for marketing with OpenCart for the eCommerce component. This was one of the first sites that I worked on at i-Tul, I remember the early stages. It was before CSS3 was really mainstream, so I […]
Wear Yeti was a printed clothing company that my sister’s friend co-founded. This is one of my first mostly hand drawn sites. Most of the core structural elements were drawn by me, while the client drew most of the content elements and obviously the shirts. The site is designed with a full admin backend to […]
J Prassa Printers is a local small copy and printing shop near me. They wanted to digitize their work order forms, so I created a web app with authentication and a database that almost perfectly mimicked the look and feel of their old paper envelope forms, and could then be printed onto the same paper […]