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Rettus-Code

Get your webpage noticed!

The internet is a big place and it is not always easy getting noticed through all the clutter. You need the right tools and a great customer experience to get their attention. I can bring you the tools you need to optimize your web presence. This site was designed to demonstrate responsiveness with mobile devices so please check it out on your phone.

layers of code, and binary each at diferent depths and angles in 3d moving forward while scrolling up on a repeated loop

About Me

Navy Chief's anchor. A fouled golden anchor with the anchor chain looping back and forth behind it, and in Silver the letters U S N on front
Coming from

I spent 22 years in the Navy working with amazing people, and doing incredible things. I developed a laundry list of skills, but probably the most important was tenacity and knowing how far I can push myself to accomplish my goals. I was ready to start a new challenge, and finish an old dream.

Western Washington University Vikings logo. Everything on a blue backdrop The middle has a viking ship proudly riding up a wave centered in a silver circular field. This field has Western above and vikings below in silver following the curve of the circular field with and a silver ring around everything. The blue backdrop extends to the edges of the image.
Currently

I went back to school. First completing a transfer degree in computer science, I was accepted at Western Washington University to complete my BS in Computer Science. I recently graduated and while I feel like I've accomplished much, I know there is a larger journey of growth and development in front of me. I look forward to meeting new challenges and learning from those experiences.

A blue almost cloudless sky. A large white sign shaped to point to the foreground on a black pole scribed with the word 'ethics'. Behind and to the right is another black pole with other white signs pointing in different directions. Each with one of the following words from top down: Dilemma, values, right, compliance, morals, wrong, benefit, and choice.
The future

I look forward to the opportunity to jump into being a full stack developer. I want to focus on ethical programming. With accessibility concerns, and new rules on privacy, not only is it a financial concern, but one we owe to our communities that support the work we do. Additionally I'd like to bring the advantages of the internet to communities that have little access to it beyond being a user.

Scroll through my testimonials!

(Not actual testimonials just a formatting example)

Image of young white businessman wearing a suit with a well groomed beard and hair in an office meeting smiling at the camera while three colleagues discuss business behind him.
Joseph Doe

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Headshot on a silver background of a smiling professional black woman wearing a blue blouse and grey business jacket, and long spiraling hair
Jane Doe

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Headshot on a dark grey background of a sminling professional black man wearing a blue suit with red tie, a well groomed goatee and short cut hair.
John Doe

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Headshot with a blurred city background of a stoic asian woman, wearing a blue business jacket, purple blouse with long straight hair.
Jenny Doe

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

A space fight between a large battleship against several smaller frigates and cruisers in the mmorpg Eve Online
The Japanese city of Yokohama at dusk from across the bay, featuring the bay, several tall buildings including Yokohama Landmark tower, and their 112 meter tall ferris wheel. The buildings and ferris wheel are light up against a slightly cloudy dusk sky
Bridge of Enterprise and crew. In ceneter is a diseveled Captain Pike leaning on the navigation console flanked by Sulu and unknown pilot both sitting. Behind is Spock observing, and three security members in the background.
A bard from D&D, wearing a Scottish looking tunic, some leather armor, pants and booots. Two sword strapped to the left, and a string instrument on his back. His long hair is pulled back, right hand holds a sword, and left hand is levitating a gold coin in the air.
A snippet of lines of code on a dark background
The pillars of creation, a famous image of a dust cloud in distant space that almost looks like a ghostly hand reaching up with light blue gas clouds and stars as a backdrop.
15 cups of coffee in different cups on different saucers, some with foam some without. Each one with foam has a different design or pattern drawn in the foam
Crew of firefly, On a space backdrop and the firefly class ship Serenity stands her crew. The captain Malcolm Reynolds, his first mate Zoe and security Jane up front and armed. Behind them, talented pilot Hoban, Companion Inara, savant engineer Kaylee, mysterious Sheppard Book, broken genius River Tam, and her brother Dr. Simon Tam.
Spaceballs, Darth helmet (Rick Moranis) with his mask up sticking his tongue out at Spaceball President Skroob (Mel Brooks).

Portfolio

You can navigate to the website or the repo to review the code. You can see the sites evolve as my skills improved.

Landing page of a website for a fictional hotel. The image used was of the pool area, in front is a kiddy pool, past that are three umbrellas each with two lounging chairs, followed by the main pool with more umbrellas and chairs. The background is trees and hotel rooms under a blue sky with pillowy and wispy clouds.
Bellingham Hotel

Project for an internet resources minor. Solo project completed in PHP, MySQL, Sass, and good ole JS. It was my first time using PHP and found it pretty impressive. This and other projects influenced me to rebuild my portfolio with PHP, originally done with React and Node.

Bellingham Hotel Repo
Landing page of a website for a for fashion retail. The center of the page has a strong conjfident female model wearing a pink outfit with a matching sash belt.
Ploom

Startup project for a fashion advice application. Git manager in charge of creating new sprints and merging into development branch for testing and QA review. Promoted to Lead Engineer responsible for managing team resources, determining best technical approach and assisting the rest of the team in developing solutions. Manage SQL and Firestore databases and develop third party APIs for ecomerce sites to use our fashion advice AI. Due to NDA, cannot share repo for this project.

Ploom
Landing page of a website for a for fashion retail. The center of the page has a strong conjfident female model wearing a pink outfit with a matching sash belt.
Ploom Marketing Campaign

Asked to put together a simple static site to be used for a Social Media Marketing Campaign. The requirements were for it to be responsive, collect emails, and send an email response. A good weekend project, deployed it to Firebase as a severless app, used their realtime db for the email collection, and a wrote a Firebase function to send emails when a new input is added to the collection. Added in a regex for email format and checks the db to ensure email is unique to the collection. Setup a Firestore db for future use to accept templates to autosend them to the emails in the realtime db collection. Mostly had some fun using JS for DOM manipulation.

Ploom Marketing
Demonstrates the audio replay format and metadata input.
Redruth Project

This was a proof of concept for a community based audio recording website that was intended to be used by a library in Redruth UK. It was designed with a minimal use case. Users audio recordings are stored in AWS S3 buckets and data in Mongodb. Western Washington University has taken it on as an ongoing project to expand its use case and explore its potential. If you save a recording it requires the Webmaster to approve it before it becomes available to the public.

Repo
Deadwood

A Java based digital version of the Deadwood boardgame using Swing for the GUI. This was an Object Oriented Program with a focus on design creation and implementation. My partner and I used MVC, Observer, Singleton, Builder, and Composite design patterns. Feel free to play the video demo and checkout the repo for some of the design documentation we used.

Repo
Github accopunt for rettus-code. Top left is an image of the account owner, with some description and links below the image, the right two thirds has a list of a few repo's related to the account and graphics indicating activity on the site.
My github repo

Standard Github repo. Most of the projects I've done, whether for school or something on the side I've put here with plenty more coming soon, I can't wait to help share with the world what you want them to know about you.

Repo
A blog that was my first webpage, has image of an old sailor on the left, another of a circa 1980s computer and programmer on the right, navigation links to blog entries between them, and the start of the first blog post below that.
Blog

My first webpage. I used a Summer my first year in school to learn a bit of HTML and CSS and this was what I came up with. It was a fun start I learned it was easy to build a web page, but difficult to make it usefull, well with just those tools, what a difference JS makes. Wanting to be able to work anywhere I go, it was a proof of concept that I could do this while travelling at 70mph, no worries, my wife was driving.

My start Repo Spot
Gaming and anime Store Site, showing images of Naruto, a terrasque, D & D characters and monsters
The early years

Next I learned about responsive design and wanted to explore it. Expanding on what I had learned, I used more styling to explore what i could make. While no master of design, I was quickly learning the technical aptitude to make things appear on the screen just how I wanted them. I could do so much better today, but it still sparks the creative side of my geekiness. Inspired by a local business that had to shut it's doors.

Fanboy Repo Spot
In the center are two nearly empty glass beer mugs on a bar with peoples forearms resting on the bar. There is a box just off center with the title 'Find breweries near you'
BrewFinder

First group project for the UW bootcamp certification. We were required to use 3 APIs to develop an application. My part was to work on the Javascript. I liked the idea, but a weeks is just not enough time, still it was a cool idea and great first team project for me.

BrewFinder Repo Spot
A website with a navbar in yellow on top with the name PawsLife, below that is a banner taking a third of the vertical space with pets headshots from left to right of a bulldog, calico cat, basset hound, an exotic short hair cat, and french bulldog puppy. The lower 2thirds has side by side large buttons. Left button has an sillhouette of a walking cat title under 'Feline Friendly Services.The right is a sillhouette of a dog running playfully title under 'Puppy Pals Services'.
PawsLife

Second group project for UW certification. We had lofty goals for 8 days work, but it was a lot of fun. It's unfortunate we had so little time to develop a plan and use the software development life cycle. Short turn arounds often drove us to begin to develop before a plan was fully explored wich required scope creep to the app design evolved during development.

Repo Spot
Videezy, video conference made it easy stated at the top, the lower left is a static image of someone being streamed via webcam, and the right a few lines describing the video streaming services uses.
Videezy

Final group project for UW certification, our concept was to create a video conference site that had multiple rooms similar to different classrooms or offices that users could move in and out of. My focus was on the server side particularly getting the video streaming API to work, the database for user account creation and login validation. I love the concept and will continue to work on it, watch out zoom.

Back End Front End
A demo for an internet privacy awareness app. The top is a map that automatically zooms into the users location, followed by a targeted ad that uses their local weather to make recomendations.
Internet Privacy

This was a Short group project to create awareness about internet privacy concerns as part of an ethics in technology class. I made the 256 char random unique key stored in a cookie to identify return users, made API requests getting data based on device location. Used derived location data to create directed ads, and graphs for census data demonstrating how users could be profiled. Contributed to styling by creating automation with javascript.

Internet Privacy Demo Repo

Design Description

A list of tools used on the site and brief explanation for design

Resources that made it work

  • PHP
  • SCSS
  • Bootstrap
  • Jquery
  • Javascript
  • Fontawesome
  • Scrollreveal
  • Baguettebox
  • Owlcarousel
  • Mysql
  • The sweat of coders before me

My process

I expect most people viewing this site will be on PCs, but I wanted to demonstrate the importance of mobile first development. In the first iteration of this portfolio it had seperate pages you could navigate to via the navBar. I decided for mobile devices to switch it to a single page they could scroll and swipe to view as much as possible without constantly opening the nav button. There is still a navBar however for mobile devices it stays at the top of the site rather than fixed on the screen. I did add a fixed button on the bottom to return to top for easy direct navigation if the user would like.
Baguettebox is a great way to make a gallery small that users can quickly open and view all the pictures without opening a new page, and owl-caresoul allows you to have cards not taking up large amounts of screen space that users can easily swipe through. With one exception the design was about ease of navigation and reduced use of screen space, the "About Me" section I needed for a cool animation effect using scrollreveal.

Contact

Social Media


LinkedIn

UpWork

Github Profile


Contact Information:

Michael S Rettus II       ph#(360) 499-9260

email:

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Pic of me above the waist, White male with a striped collared shirt, wearing a ballcap framed by two trees with a valley and hills in the background