Jake Broughton
jake@mythical.fish

My name is Jake Broughton; I'm a solution-finder and full-stack software engineer, specializing in JavaScript and Ruby.

I'm currently looking for the following:

  • Awesome people
  • Awesome projects
  • Cool tech
  • 100% remote work
  • Senior/Lead position
  • Long-term involvement

Skills

I’m familiar with a lot of tech, but nowadays this is where I excel:

  • JavaScript, Node.js, GraphQL
  • React, Redux, Vue, SSR
  • CSS (PostCSS, Tailwind)
  • Ruby, Rails, SQL
  • Bash, Vim, Git, VSCode
  • DevOps (AWS, Google Cloud)
Check out my skill tree if you're interested!

Super powers

As well as coding skills, I have the following qualities:

  • Seriously full-stack + an eye for design
  • Experienced project planner & manager
  • Always learning
  • Solid communication & social skills
  • Innately positive & proactive
  • Creative thinker, problem solver

Portfolio

I worked on the CoinFi platform for several months, cleaning up and refactoring their Rails codebase, as well as implementing the functional CSS framework Tachyons, and React via Webpacker.

Their React needs were quite unique, as some pages needed to be server-rendered, but they wanted to keep using Ruby/Rails as the app framework, so server-rending with Node wasn't an option. My solution was to replace special tags with React components as needed, and optionally connected with the Redux store.

Weavenote allows fashion designers to login to their organization, collaboratively create projects, upload images, annotate those images, add measurements, materials, comments, instructions, and ultimately produce "tech sheets" which are PDFs to be given to clothing manufacturers.

I built this complex browser-based app over several months, using React and Rails; it's currently awaiting a little more funding to get it off the ground.

Code is private

A Youtube-like site I built for fun.

The frontend is built with React, Redux, PostCSS, and receives its data from a Rails API. The Rails app also provides an interface which allows the user to upload large videos, where they get transcoded into multiple qualities and formats using Amazon Elastic Transcoder, stored on S3, and finally delivered through Cloudfront to the end user.

For this project, a beautiful website was designed for me to implement in any way I saw fit.

Instead of Wordpress (which I've often used in the past for projects of this type), I opted to use Rails. One might think that Rails would be overkill for a project like this, but it turned out to fit the client's needs perfectly. I made use of rails_admin, Code Mirror, and a clever implementation to quickly provide an admin interface which allows the site to be totally customized, and all of the content managed in a simple way.

The client was very happy with the implementation: editable HTML partials which can be included in pages or other partials using simple identifier tags, and an image manager which works much the same way, but provides URLs to the CDN hosted images.

uncharteddigital.nlCode is private

Mythical Fish (this website)

For building this portfolio I decided to use Gatsby and Netlify CMS, which grants multiple benefits.

Gatsby allowed me to write React code in order to build and generate a static website which is both super-fast, and search-engine friendly. The content of this site is saved in a markdown format which is accesible to the app via GraphQL. Whenever an update is pushed (whether from the command line or via the CMS), the site rebuilds itself.

Pretty neat!

The Public House of Art was the first big project I took on as a freelancer; I worked with them from the very beginning, and I built their entire online platform, as well as provided input on its design.

I built this website using Ruby on Rails, and Spree - the biggest, most supported ecommerce framework for Rails. Spree is rock-solid, and is totally customizable and extendable, which allowed me to create or modify features & functionality, in order to meet the client's specifications. These features included:

  • The ability to add & administer artists, and associate them with their product (artworks).
  • Their unique price-tiering system and mount options.
  • A customized checkout flow, and a totally custom integration with a small Dutch payment gateway provider.
phoa.demo.fishCode is private

I built Kaanjo for a client in 2016, it consists of 2 parts: the JS plugin, and the Dashboard.

The plugin is for eCommerce websites and blogs, and it renders Facebook-style reaction icons (Like, Love, etc.).

The dashboard allows website owners to sign in, and provides an overview their collected data, see which pages (or products) are being reacted to, and of course which reactions their users are having. They can create multiple campaigns, each having different parameters, and custom end-user messages and icons (uploaded or chosen from a library of icons).