I'm Jonathan Kinvig
The software developer
About me
As a long-term tech enthusiast, software development has always been an interest of mine. I went to university to study computing, which led me to my first job as a software developer. Seven years of development later, three of which as self-employed, I'm more passionate than ever about creating great products with the latest technology I can get my hands on.
My work
I primarily create websites that provide a service and approach each project with three goals in mind. Each product should perform well, be easy to use and look great. These all revolve around making the experience as enjoyable as possible for the user. The success of any public facing site hinges on it's users and they should always be a priority.
The tools that help me build
Languages and frameworks
With so many different languages and frameworks to choose from, and more being added all the time, I like to try out new technologies whenever I get the chance. With my projects being web based and my preferred stack being Microsoft, some things don't change that often, .NET Core and all the usual web related technologies are a staple. However, I do tend to change up database and front end technologies between projects as well as trying out any extensions of existing tech, such as Sass and Typescript.
language.NET Core, Entity Framework, MVC, Angular, Bootstrap
codeC#, SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript
webSass, Typescript, JQuery
Services
The services that I use help to streamline the build, deployment and maintenance tasks, which can quite easily become big time investments. Visual Studio Team Services provides me with source control, builds and deployment all in one place and has great integration with other Microsoft products. Azure is my cloud platform of choice as it has services for everything that I could ever need and their PaaS offerings take away all the pain of dealing with any maintenance or infrastructure tasks myself.
cloudAzure
buildAzure DevOps
Software
Software is another key element to the development and design process, a good piece of software can exponentially improve productivity. Visual Studio provides best in class development tools, which makes it an easy choice for my IDE. SQL Management Studio is an invaluable tool for all things SQL, I especially appreciate tools included to improve query performance. Affinity Designer is an excellent piece of graphic design software that enables me to be much more creative with my designs.
codeVisual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio
createAffinity Designer
What I'm working on
Squadgrid
This is a website that is designed to be a platform where people who play online games can find other players or teams to join. The current focus is on Dota 2 with the intention of adding more games in the future. The end goal for Squadgrid is much more than just a team finding website but to become a place where people can also manage and organise their teams.
Priceraft
Coming soon - A tool that allows users to create watch lists of products that they can then monitor and customise. In addition to being able to review top product lists and curated product suggestions based on their watch list trends. The site is to be targeted specifically at the Amazon shopping platform.