tommysailing

About Me.

I spend a good percentage of my days on the Sydney-Newcastle train (pictured above). The rest of my time I spend doing the below:


Design & Development Skillset.

HTML, CSS & JavaScript

Engineers like standards. This school of thought is no different when applied to my web development. I specialise in writing HTML5 and CSS3 code that's clean, functional and standards-compliant. I'm still learning how to do fancy stuff in CSS - in the meantime I tend to commit the mortal sin of using JavaScript. Happily, I can at least meld JavaScript and jQuery to create dynamic Web content that feels fast. After all, it's the user experience that matters, doesn't it?

Adobe Creative Suite Cloud

From concept to production, these tools are indispensible to my craft. Photoshop is my most used tool by far, given static image manipulation is something I do on a weekly basis (ergo - every single image on Gift Sensations), followed by InDesign, which I use to make print material for clients that need such a service. I don't pretend to be an expert in video editing, but I've used Adobe Premiere Pro for years, from making terrible high school videos (I'm not even going to consider providing links) to major productions for family events including holidays and weddings.

CMS & Languages

The first programming language I learned was C, from an eccentric Russian lecturer by the name of Igor. Thanks to Igor and his penchant for teaching such a core language (C, not Russian), I've adapted this to skilling up in PHP, Perl, JavaScript, C# and (ugh) Visual Basic. I've written highly specialised customisations to Magento, the world's most complex e-Commerce platform. I've had experience writing code and developing sites in ePages, WordPress, Concrete5 and Microsoft SharePoint.


Electrical Engineering.

Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) (Honours) UNSW

According to the framed slip of paper hanging in the place where pictures of one's family usually go, I'm a qualified Electrical Engineer, having completed my degree with Honours in 2015. I'm a graduate member of Engineers Australia, working on becoming Chartered within the next five years. While I was at University, I completed a thesis about the nbn™, and I also spent the last two years as a teaching staff member - a lab demonstrator for second-year courses in Embedded Systems Design and Digital Circuit Design; interests which I've retained to this day as hobbies.

Building Services Engineer

My full-time job is Graduate Building Services Electrical Engineer (what a mouthful) at a medium-large national consulting engineering company, at the Sydney office. I absolutely love this job, to put it simply. I spend my days doing basically something completely different than the previous day - designing electrical infrastructure for massive buildings; specifying construction instructions for those buildings; and visiting construction sites to make sure everything's getting done correctly. Not only this, but I work with every other discipline in the construction industry, expanding my overall engineering knowledge every single day.