Nick Vaughn

Development of the Adilas Market Back End

Jan 2016 coldfusion development

Under the guidance of Brandon Moore and with the artistic direction from Russell Moore, I took the lead on coding the back end of the Adilas Market- the very same website you see right here. My task was to take the site's design and make it work by using pieces of the adilas infrastructure that were already in place. It took us several months to get to a launch-ready state, and I'm really impressed with how it turned out.

This was a great project for me- I learned a ton, and had fun in the process. Russell did a great job designing the site and the profiles, and it was really cool to see how the vision came together little by little. Whenever I got stuck, I would ask myself, "How can I make this piece of data go here?" It also helped to draw things out so I could picture the relationships between the data I need to display and the data that's currently in the database.

The Black Box Project

Aug 2016 Developer

To facilitate the increasing demand for custom work on the main Adilas site, we would need some easier access points for each and every page on the application. Enter the Black Box- a system-wide overhaul of how each page is built as it is accessed. 

Prior to this project, any given Adilas page would be generated as-is from the .cfm file, pulling in only predetermined headers and footers as includes. If a customer needed a customized version of a page, the assigned developer would need to copy the entire file (which could be anywhere from 1,000 to 10K lines of code) and make the necessary customizations. If ever the original file were updated or modified in any way, we would have to go in and change every single custom page. Not only is that time-consuming and prone to error, it's also not very fun.

The Black Box Project sought to fix this problem by breaking each page down into more manageable pieces. The initial ColdFusion logic at the top of the file would remain the same for each, but the rest of the page's components - mostly dealing with HTML output and additional custom logic - would be sliced out of the page and be pulled in as includes. This would allow a developer to perform custom work only on the needed part of the page, instead of pulling down the entire thing. This would save a lot of time and money down the road, but an initial investment was required- somebody would have to modify each and every page on the site to include the Black Box access points.

This is where I came in. Adilas currently has hundreds of pages, and each of them needed the Black Box treatment. I started with the pages that needed the most amount of custom work, and that usually meant eCommerce and Point of Sale. A typical page required me to create 1-3 new files containing the customizable bits of information, insert the Black Box code, and then test the new and improved page's functionality. Along the way, I also updated some of the older code and cleaned up any errors or redundancies that I found. 

The Black Box Project taught me a lot about how a proprietary web application is built, and how many moving parts there are in the Adilas machine. I also learned some best practices in coding, especially in terms of efficiency. As mentioned earlier, the inclusion of easier access points for custom work has saved developers a considerable amount of time in the initial development of custom work and in the updating of application files. 

nickvaughn.me

Jan 2017 web development

My website, nickvaughn.me, launched in early 2017 as a part of my formal education in Web & Mobile Development at Bridgerland Technology College. It served as a holding place for some of my class assignments, and now that I have a good number of them under my belt, it's a way for me to showcase a bit of what I know about building web sites. 

The front page of the site is powered by WordPress. I have a few Pages that hold some long-term information, such as my About page and a Contact form, and I'm continually adding more of my completed projects via Posts. Each Post has a link to a sub-directory of the main site, along with a brief description of the project itself. 

You can access the front page by clicking here. Enjoy!