Olga Fomin

The objective of this project was to build a large-scale social app that allows users to create clusters of friends they'd want opinions from, then upload content and get feedback instantly. Optio app was created during 4 weeks in collaboration with the full-stack developer using agile project management methodologies.

I was the main contributor to the front-end using React/Redux, Material-UI, React Router. Also I was responsible for creating Friends List model and functionality for adding new friends list at the back end. We used Node/Express and MongoDB to manage the back-end side of this project, ZenHub to manage the workflows, GitHub for source control, and Slack for team communications.

The redesign of the website for the California Bird Records Committee was conducted by the students of San Francisco City College during one semester. As a team of students from visual design and web development departments, we worked together to create a completely new look and feel for the website. Our main goal was to make it more user friendly and visually appealing. Another important task was to allow users to access and send records from their mobile devices.

My most challenging task was to present the requested data from the database in a clear and attractive way. As a result, the table allows easy access to information and adjusts to the size of the device.

Another important task was to transform the Rare Bird Gallery into the visually appealing page with the search option. The user can now filter images by the bird name, zoom and slide through images.

During this project, I created a personal website and a blog for the school teacher using Ruby on Rails. Besides providing introductory and contact information, the client needed a blog-like solution for posting educational resources, summaries of the lessons, useful links, and any other school-related data.

In the final product, the author has access to the author's console, has the ability to create, edit and delete posts, attach media, add tags, links, etc. Users can read posts, search them by categories, date or keywords and share them on social networks. The website is intended for Russian-speaking users.

This project was completed using Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, Sass, PostgreSQL, and jQuery. Other tools used were Cloud9 development environment, Slack for communication, and Heroku cloud platform for deployment.

The client, a UX researcher and designer, needed a clean, straightforward solution to showcase her work. The project-based design focuses on demonstrating the final product and relevant documents such as user flow, competitive analysis, wireframes, etc. The biggest challenge was to display a lot of visual content in a simplistic, yet attractive way for the convenience of potential users and employers.

As a side project, I built a Facial Recognition app using React framework and Node.js at the back end. The most interesting challenge for me as a front-end developer was to create the server that will handle any requests from the app, including user registration, user data change or image processing. To detect faces in the images, I used the Face Detection Model provided by the Clarifai API. This service uses artificial intelligence to recognize the visual content. The user submits an image, and the coordinate locations of where the faces might appear are returned.

Using FaceId, visitors have the ability to register, sign in, modify profile data or delete their profiles completely, take selfies and send them for the face recognition, update the avatar and stay logged in when they return to the website.

What's next? The next challenge would be to use other image recognition models by Clarifai like demographics prediction or apparel recognition to make the image feedback data more interesting for the users. In the future, I would also like to use IndexedDB API along with Service Worker to make the app more performant and to have more control over caching strategy.

The client for this project - a private chef and a health coach - needed a website that will help her share the benefits of wholesome nutrition and advertise her services. The initial questionnaire and further discussions with the client made it clear that a blog would be the best solution in this case since it will make it easy to add new updates for recipes and posts describing the benefits of plant-based nutrition and a healthier lifestyle.

I used Soledad Wordpress theme that provides a convenient recipe addition to each post so all information about ingredients, nutrition facts and cooking instructions is nicely organized and visually attractive. However, a lot of customization was necessary. A home page begins with the featured slider and also gives a short introduction to what visitors can expect to find on this website.

The bright color palette for this website was chosen based on the client's Caribbean background and plant-based nature of her cooking. The green logo represents a healthier lifestyle and eco-friendly food choices that the client advocates through her blog posts and recipes.

One of the important features that needed to be implemented was the clear organization of the recipes. As the content is expected to grow fast, it was necessary to organize recipes by categories on the 'Recipes' page as well as in the menu. The tag system and the search bar can also help users browse the website.

During the work on this project, the client had some new ideas that needed to be implemented as well. Therefore, the new client form was added to the 'Services' page and images on the 'Gallery' page were reorganized in a way that best shows their different dimensions.

One of my favorite features is the Instagram gallery in the footer. Since the client originally started to share the content on Instagram, it was important to add it to the website's layout.

What's next? In the future, the client wants to add more services and implement the payment system on the website. In addition, the subscription to the new recipes and free meal plans should be added as well to attract new clients.