Hi, my name is Paul Kim and I currently live in the San Fernando Valley in sunny Southern California. I am a perfectionist who works as a web developer and web designer.
Skills & Experience
My main areas of expertise are:
- PHP 4 & 5
- MySQL 4 & 5
- CodeIgniter Framework
- CSS
- HTML/XHTML
- XML
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- AJAX
- Photoshop
- Web Services
- Project Management
In the decade of doing professional web development, I am fortunate enough to have worked on everything from custom CMS solutions to E-Commerce stores to custom ERP/CRM solutions. I have contributed to open source projects like osCommerce and the Open Source Google Apps Provisioning Toolkit, which was created at Google's request. If you can dream it, I can and build it.
Working with APIs and Web Services is one my favorite things to do. I've integrated with the Google Maps, YouTube, Amazon, QuickBooks and SalesForce APIs to name a few.
Working at a boutique web design and devlopment company means one may have several roles. I have spent the past few years doing Project Management in addition to my Lead Developer duties. Managing a small team of designers and developers and communicating with the client every step of the way, I make sure projects get completed on time and on budget.
Please take a look at my Portfolio for examples of my work.
Availability
I am currently gainfully employed and not actively looking for any freelance work. However, if an interesting project comes my way, I may consider it. Please feel free to contact me for any reason except spam.
History
I started web design when I was 15 years old in 1995 with good ol' Front Page and Photoshop. Don't worry, I stopped using Front Page shortly afterwards and have been hand coding ever since. I started development in 2001 with PHP and MySQL. I prefer development over design because it's more straightfoward.
Education
I am mostly self-taught but I attended a graphic design school for 6 months where I learned fundamental concepts like color theory, the importance of lines, gestalt and art history. When it came time to take technical classes, like how to use Photoshop and Quark, I thought I'd save myself some time and money and drop out because I could learn all of that on my own much more quickly.
One of my best assets is the ability to learn and adapt quickly. I am always looking to expand my mental toolset and am currently learning Python and the Django Framework. I am also feeding my brain some ActionScript and more advanced JavaScript.
I believe in efficiency and I strive to make every solution as efficent as possible in development as well as in production. Efficiency mandates the way I code and design. The pursuit of maximum efficiency pushes me to build clean and elegant solutions that have everything you need and nothing you don’t.
Code should be well formatted and readable, with the minimum amount of code necessary to complete a task. Lightweight and agile solutions are mandatory, with a emphasis on speed and usability.
The user experience must be simple and easy to use, yet powerful enough to do everything the user desires. Although browser specific hacks are sometimes necessary, standards-compliant code should be employed whenever possible.
Pixel Perfection is delicious.
NetBeans IDE
A great IDE that supports pretty much any language you throw at it.
Yii
A fairly new and lightweight, yet feature-rich, PHP framework that has the best performance out of all of them.
jQuery
My JavaScript framework of choice.
alpha net
My current employer.
