About Ruben

I am a Web Developer at Johns Hopkins University Press, working primarily with Drupal and React (Typescript). You can find below, in order: my philosophy in the creation of this site, a broad outline of my current work, my hobby projects, and a little about me at the end.

About this Site

As a Technical Support Specialist turned Digital Accessibility Specialist turned Web Developer, I have honed my technical and troublshooting skills. But I do not only have technical competence; I can also communicate goals to leadership, recieve feedback from stakeholders, and train nontechnical staff. I have arranged my portfolio to include specific examples of these two broad categories I excel at.

I have chosen to keep the CSS on this portfolio minimal: you are here to find information about me, not to be amazed by a sparkling cursor, impressive bezier curves, or text that slides onto the screen after a delay. If you are interested in seeing examples of my CSS comptence, please refer to examples in the Development section.

Career

Drupal Development

My work primarily focuses on front-end Drupal development: custom module development, troubleshooting bugs, and continuous evaluation for quality improvement and accessibility. My work also includes server configuation (Linux/Apache), certs, and basic maintenance.

One major project is the creation of a Drupal Multisite to drastically reduce development time spent on client association sites. Using this structure, we can build one set of templates for (Drupal) paragraphs, blocks, and views. Those templates are then available to be used in any association site. In order to allow customization on a per-association basis, I built the "Brand Styles" custom module to allow Hopkins Press personnel to configure styles for each site in a safe, reliable way.

React & TypeScript

My introduction to coding was through vanilla JavaScript, and it will always hold a place in my heart. I have found, however, that TypeScript makes for a much more reliable developer experience. Reading other's code (and your own) becomes so much easier. I still use JavaScript for some Drupal work or for random little projects, but overall I prefer TypeScript.

Despite its quirks, I enjoy React. I have chosen to delve deeper into learning React rather than spreading my knowledge across other frameworks like Angular or Vue. I also enjoy using the meta-framework Next.js (but still TypeScript)—this is what I've used for Math Fun as well as the Hopkins Press Books Chatbot (example of one of the pages where the chatbot appears).

Hobby

I enjoy working on web projects in my free time as well. I tend to use React (or React Native) for these projects, such as JobNote (web) or FortunAI (mobile app). I manage the servers and daemon processes to upkeep them; while I design the PostgreSQL databases for these projects, I use a managed database to leave me more time for frontend work.

About Me

In my free time, I like to hike, read, and search for new bubble tea spots.