Unaffiliated Freelance, Spring 2016
Before I went to code school but after I had been let go from yet another editing job because it lost major clients, my wife and I started a boutique advertising agency. The frustration of putting together multiple Wordpress sites that made me pay for plugins that could actually communicate with a database is actually what drove me to code school.
So this was my first major freelance project out of code school, and I maintained this for the next five years. It was a pretty straightforward CRUD app. Members of the Marine Leadership Alliance would access the URL and enter their reservation information.
The admin for this registration had a very specific workflow and was not interested in modifying anything, so the process mimicked the way she did it on paper when it first started. Emails were sent out to four admins each time a user completed registration. The main admin got a CSV attachment that she would import into MS Access 2005. I built an admin panel that required a login, and she would use this to track which CSVs she might not have gotten via email.
This is where I learned that my writing and editing background really helped with client relations. The client didn't really understand what computers were capable of, so I was able to walk her through unfamiliar operations like CSV import and switching tabs on an admin panel.