About Me
My name is Brandon Wamboldt, and I’m a developer from Nova Scotia, Canada. I’m 20 years old, and since I first started programming when I was 11; I’ve run my own company and had dozens of clients, worked at the leading web development agency for my city, and worked on a lot of cool projects on my own time. I used to be employed at Research In Motion, but now I’m back to running my own company while I look for a new gig (I was part of layoffs at RIM that resulted in a 30% reduction in workforce size).
In my spare time, I work on cool programming projects and scripts, help teach other people programming and continually update my skill set.
My Workflow
My main workstation is a Windows 7 computer. I use a combination of Adobe tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) on a fairly regular basis, for slicing designs to convert to HTML/CSS. I use a variety of editors depending on the task, with my main editor being Sublime Text 2. I frequently use Eclipse, Notepad2, and Nano/Vim as well. I love using Cygwin for a Linux like terminal (and all the goodness of grep/sed/awk).
The other big part of my workflow is a VM server, where I run several dev/testing environments with Ubuntu/CentOS environments. Almost all of my projects end up getting deployed to Linux, so I like my dev environments reflecting that. I use some standard images to kick off the VM, then I have a Puppet server to keep everything working the same.
I use Git for version control, and highly recommend it over non-DVCS such as SVN, or CVS. Mercurial is another pretty great option.
For testing my websites, I primarily develop within Google Chrome, and love it’s integrated developer tools.
My server stack is based on Linux VMs running on the VMWare ESXi Hypervisor, with Nginx or Apache for the web servers, MongoDB, MySQL or Postgres for the database servers and PHP-FPM/PHP for the scripting language. Recently started working with Node.js & Ruby too, which I like quite a lot.
Skills
And now some of my technical skills in case you’re looking for a developer 
(Also, check out my online CV, StackOverflow Careers page, and LinkedIn profile)
Front-End Development
- I’m very proficient with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS/CSS3/XML/JSON
- I very frequently use the following JavaScript libraries: jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, LESS and AJAX
- I very frequently use the following HTML frameworks: Bootstrap, Zurb Foundation, HTML5 Boilerplate
- I’m very proficient with Git and use it on a daily basis
- I’ve developed dozens of custom WordPress themes
- Caching (via .htaccess or server config)
Back-End Dev
- I’m extremely proficient with: PHP, OOP PHP, OOP best practices, MVC
- I’m very proficient with the following databases: MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, MongoDB
- WordPress, WordPress plugin development, WordPress customization
- CodeIgniter, Symfony2, Zend Framework
- Python, Django, mod_wsgi
- Optimization (caching, PHP extensions, memcache/redis)
Servers
- Linux system administration (RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu)
- Apache setup (compiling, configuration, optimization)
- PHP/PHP-FPM/mod_php setup (compiling, configuration, securing, optimization)
Experience
- I’ve setup dozens of Linux based servers, from all-in-one setups like my personal server, which runs Web/Database/E-mail/FTP to dedicated database servers running MySQL & Mongo, to dedicated web servers running fine-tuned Apache or Nginx installations. I’ve worked with CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu servers.
- Developed an in-house PHP framework to power a massive internal application used by dozens of people in collaboration with several other developers
- Built several applications that made time-consuming tasks trivial using a super simple UI and a powerful custom built search tool, which saved hundreds of man-hours and allowed time-sensitive reports to be delivered earlier
- Moved archaic and outdated desktop applications to custom built web solutions, which saved the company tens of thousands of dollars per year in manual/repetitive labor
Hobbies & Interests
- Reading blogs and online articles in my spare time (Ars Technica and Coding Horror are among my favourites)
- I enjoy gaming on my custom built PC (First Person Shooters or Role Playing Games), or on my PS3. My favourite games at the moment would be Far Cry 3
- Working on some personal projects to put on GitHub, make my life easier and learn new skills. Also trying to find some open source projects I can contribute to
Recommended Reading
These are some of the websites I read often and would recommend
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