The Tumble

Me, now

This site is where things stand now: a lake built from SVG and code that turns with the seasons, a narrator who talks with her hands, and a Studio that turns a day outside into a post and a podcast. It began with ProPre, the press for my coloring books, which brought me back to web development this May. The rest of the site followed.

2015window.addEventListener('resize', function () {
  card.classList.toggle('wide', card.offsetWidth > 480);
});

2026.shelf { container-type: inline-size; }
@container (width > 30rem) { .card { display: grid; } }

Me, then

Then home to Honolulu. At MVNP I was associate digital director and senior front-end developer, working in AngularJS, Node.js, MongoDB and Bootstrap, and we launched First Hawaiian Bank's new brand guidelines alongside its executives and marketing team. At Anthology Media Group I led the experience design team and brought prototyping and usability testing into the work, for clients like Hawaii Pacific Health. In 2018 I started 123 ADAPT in Kailua, building and running sites for Manoa Valley Theatre and Hawaii Realty Group. Our own site ran on WordPress with a custom front end in Twig templates through Timber, which kept the theme's markup clean and apart from WordPress's PHP.

My biggest project at MVNP was the first version of the Ke Kilohana site, for a new tower in Ward Village: a massive job, and I was in every part of it. There were three of us, a senior developer, a junior developer and me. A WordPress engine ran under a custom skin, and the front was a mock-up of the actual tower: click any window, and that unit opened. Drone shots from every level and in every direction (not mine) were tied to each unit and floor as WordPress categories, so one update to a floor's view reached every unit that shared it. Room layouts and the other shared pieces worked the same way, which mattered as the project changed and the units were built out. I also built a VR area for the building, its floor plans and its shared spaces.

kekilohana.com

In 2014 I also built MVNP's own new look with its design team, a parallax site. And for Our Kakaʻako I worked on the website and on a touch-screen installation in its information center: a map, and interactive pieces made for the touch screens.

ourkakaako.com

2012.col { float: left; width: 31.333%; margin-right: 3%; }
.col:last-child { margin-right: 0; }
.row:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; }

2017.row { display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(16rem, 1fr)); gap: 2rem; }

Me, then

I joined Pramerica Systems Ireland in Letterkenny as a senior front-end developer. It's the Irish arm of Prudential Financial (outside the US the company trades as Pramerica, because another company owns the Prudential name there), and Prudential was our only client. I built interfaces alongside the Lotus Notes, Java and .NET teams, back when jQuery was still fighting the other libraries for the job.

I helped build the process that carried open-source tools through Prudential's legal and technology reviews, with training to match, and that's how jQuery, Sass and grid frameworks came in. I also delivered the company's first responsive-design product.

For our internal tools I built a Bootstrap theme with the branding already in it. Developers who weren't strong on design could use my styles, and their pages came out on-brand without a second thought, whether they were working in .NET, Lotus Notes or Java.

2010-webkit-border-radius: 8px;
   -moz-border-radius: 8px;
        border-radius: 8px;  /* and an image for IE8 */

2026border-radius: 8px;

Me, then

I moved to Ireland, took City & Guilds' Advanced Programming I, II and III in 2005, and carried on training at NUI Maynooth in 2007. At the North West of Ireland Printing and Publishing Company, which publishes newspapers across the northwest, I was the front-end developer, the web person and tech support. A COBOL course put me in touch with the Pramerica team. I didn't like COBOL, but when they had an opening for a front-end developer in 2009, I took it.

2006<div class="box"><b class="tl"></b><b class="tr"></b>
  Content
<b class="bl"></b><b class="br"></b></div>
.tl { background: url(corner-tl.gif) no-repeat; }  /* ×4 */

2026.box { border-radius: 12px; }

Me, then

By day I waited tables; on the side I freelanced as Adaptive Designs. I built sites for Courier Corporation of Hawaii and Anderson Aviation, much of it paid in barter trade credits rather than cash. I made a couple of Flash sites and some banners, but Flash never really took hold of me.

lovealoha.com was all mine, too: pictures, movies and news, a pool webcam, and an underwater collection, with Adaptive Designs signed at the foot of the page.

For someone who never really got into Flash, I ended up running its local scene: around 2003 I took over the Hawaii Flash Users Group, HFUG.org, and gave it a new look. It was a Flash group in name, but we covered all of multimedia, and the other Macromedia and Adobe tools too. In August 2003 I gave the talk myself, on the basics of Swift 3D.

From 2000 to 2003 I was Viata's official Director of All Things Graphics, and I learned Macromedia Director there to build a CD for potential investors. When Viata split up, its people stayed together, and they still work with the technology that began there, under new names. TravelSwitch was one of them for a while.

In 2002 and 2003, with two friends, I built a site for the John A. Burns School of Medicine in Hawaii while its new building was still going up. One of us was a Flash developer, and together we turned the architects' renderings into a clickable 3D model of a building that didn't exist yet. Behind it sat a full admin area where students and alumni could log in and edit their own profiles: a complete content management system.

Still in the Wayback Machine: the school's site and its tour, as archived in September 2006, and my own site from 2002.

Virtual Tour — John A. Burns School of Medicine_ □ ×

JABSOM — Faculty & Staff_ □ ×

Adaptive Designs — Professional Imaging Solutions_ □ ×

Courier Corporation of Hawaii_ □ ×

lovealoha — visit us in the land of aloha_ □ ×

HFUG — Hawaii Flash Users Group_ □ ×

2002<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
  width="550" height="400">
  <param name="movie" value="intro.swf">
  <embed src="intro.swf" width="550" height="400">
</object>

2026<video src="intro.mp4" controls></video>

Me, then

I got online in 1997 through Road Runner in Hawaii, which came with free space for a home page. We worked out how to FTP files up to it, and a friend and I started building sites and trading them back and forth. For a long time I used FrontPage purely as a WYSIWYG editor; the code made me uneasy at first, and then it didn't. I played with a Microsoft animation tool too, just for fun. By 1999 it was my work.

My first web job was at Pacific Information Exchange (PIXI) in Honolulu, and my first project there was an order form for Oil of Aloha. Not a shopping cart: a form. It was a webmaster at PIXI, and Oil of Aloha's owner, who first told me about a search engine called Google.

Part of that first job was keeping a weekly column's site, Straight Talk, up to date. Every week a new article went up, I found a GIF to go with it, and last week's moved into the archive. Before long it was easier to make my own GIFs than to hunt them down. There was no GIPHY.

Animated GIFs from the column's 1999 archive, as the Wayback Machine kept them

1998<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr><td width="22"><img src="tl.gif" width="22" height="22"></td>
    <td background="top.gif"><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" height="1"></td>
    <td width="22"><img src="tr.gif" width="22" height="22"></td></tr>
<tr><td background="left.gif">&nbsp;</td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFBE8">Welcome to my home page!</td>
    <td background="right.gif">&nbsp;</td></tr>
<!-- …and the same again for the bottom row -->
</table>

2026.box { border-image: url(frame.png) 22 round; }
/* or, most days: */
.box { border-radius: 12px; }