Stephen Collins

Background

About Stephen Collins

I bring over 20 years of web building experience to the projects I work on. The largest continuous part of my work life has been spent at Construction Equipment Guide, a national construction trade publication, where I an responsible for front-end development, back-end programming, database development, and systems design In addition to the actual website, I have developed or contributed to the creation of a newsletter / email system, a web advertising management system, an online work order / billing system, and much more. More recently, I was responsible the company's first foray in iPhone development, and built their iPhone application. The bulk of my day to day work consists of building and maintaining our custom CMS, and creating an application to coordinate the allowed-list of product model names. While continuing to work at CEG, in 2010, I decided I wanted to take on a larger variety of projects and created, Stephen Collins Design, which eventually became Black Shirt Inc. I offered consulting services to charitable and retail sites, such as Grow for the Cure, and HoneyBee Gardens, and Paramount Capital, a Consumer Credit organization, as well as custom iPhone development. A great deal of my time over these years was spent working with DelphX, a leader in the development of equitable and informed bond markets. I worked directly with the founder in crafting the look and feel of the trading environment, and was given responsibility for the on-page interaction design. While I have plenty of experience in a Windows Server environment, I currently build my projects in a traditional LAMP stack. I have a strong focus on mobile, as much of my current work involves reworking older projects responsively and iOS app development. I work day-to-day in HTML/CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL. I have created occasional Bash scripts and Cron jobs to support my work, and regularly use Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, AWS S3, and AWS Cloudfront to support the projects I work on. I have used Python in the past to do background processing and also created a static site CMS called PyPublish. I have spent my life in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs and am always looking for opportunities that would allow me to stay in the area and work on something interesting, or meaningful.