Zane Ashby

Brain for hire.

Software Development

N.B. At the discretion of past clients, I won't publish details of private work on this page. But if you contact me directly I am willing to share reasonable technical details of systems that I have worked on, within limits of any NDAs.

Instead, here are my ten most recently active GitHub repositories below. You can then find some of my web and app work further down.

WacomWebPlugin

C – An implementation of the Wacom Tablet Plugin for modern browsers on Linux.

Comanche

PHP – A Simple and Pretty Apache Log Viewer.


Gist

JavaScript – A couple of filters for AngularJS.

irccat-go

Go – Small golang utility for pushing text to IRC.


skewer-mode (Forked)

Emacs Lisp – Skewer-mode, with basic support for HTML

Chicken-express

Scheme – A FastCGI web framework in Chicken Scheme, based on the API of Express for Node.js.


Gist

Emacs Lisp – Remove some warnings.

Git-ignore

Ruby – Small script for downloading .gitignore templates from the official GitHub .gitignore repository.


Liquid-Glob

Ruby – Custom Liquid block for globbing a directory.

Experimental-TWM

C – Another experimental TWM, with Win32 and X11 drivers in progress.



Web Development and Design

Below you can get a glimpse into my web development and design work.

alley.co.nz

alley.co.nz – 2013

Tony Alley asked me to build him a website after discovering that he needed something online to verify his domain with the Yellow Pages. We also decided that this would be a great time to start utilising the domain for email addresses.

I've built a sleek and modern website for Alley Specialised Coatings Ltd., featuring a fully responsive layout from 960px right down to mobile, with gallery and showcase pages generated from models written for Jekyll.

sohobar.co.nz

sohobar.co.nz – 2012

I jumped at the chance to build a new website for Soho Restaurant after seeing their old Flash based website that hadn't been updated in a year or two. Their requirements were simple but we knew from the start that photos would play an important role.

I've delivered a highly optimised website for both desktop and mobile web browsers that puts the emphasis right where it should be, their amazing food!

madeleinjvr.com

madeleinjvr.com – In Development

My partner, Madelein, is an aspiring illustrator and character designer. She mocked up a design for a new portfolio website and presented it to me in PDF form. I took her design and turned it into an HTML reality, scalable right down to mobile.

evansfuneral.co.nz

evansfuneral.co.nz – 2011

Evans Funeral Services approached me for a small website to be made to get them online. I happily obliged and created a design unique to them that I think captures the high standard of professionalism in their line of work.

Since the intial launch, we've worked together to add the ability to live stream a service, enabling family and friends around the world to be a part of a service that they might be unable to otherwise attend.

codeshack.co.nz

codeshack.co.nz (previous iteration) – 2011

In 2011 I co-founded a small technology startup in Gisborne, New Zealand, named CodeShack Ltd, and remained a director for the first six months of business.

Naturally I took charge of designing, building and hosting a website to help promote our newly founded business and team. I designed a single page website that has only three sections that cover the who, what, when, where, and why.

kayree.co.nz

kayree.co.nz – 2011

Kay has been happily creating jewellery for a couple of years now. She wanted a website made to help market her jewellery, and as she does a lot of her trading on TradeMe already I opted to design a website that would simply populate itself using her TradeMe listings!

A single page portal that is maintenance free and always up to date.

zaneashby.co.nz

zaneashby.co.nz (previous iteration) – 2012

ZaneAshby.co.nz is my personal domain that is used to promote myself and my work. In early 2012, due to work circumstances I decided to go through a rebranding process which included designing a color scheme, logo (including inverted and b/w versions), custom QR codes, and business cards.

While I am still fond of the design, I eventually settled on the idea of reworking the website around my skills and portfolio as opposed to services that I was providing to the local community, making it more attractive on an international level.

demonastery.org

demonastery.org – 2013

Demonastery.org is my personal blog where I can share tech related ideas and code snippets for others to use and learn from. I also treat it as a space to grow my writing skills. The design is updated somewhat regularly but always tries to stay as simple and light as possible.

This blog was originally built on a hand-written PHP engine, but was ported to Jekyll several months ago which has enabled me to blog from anywhere using Git. I frequently extend it further with Ruby.

localhost

localhost – 2013

All of this hosted on a fast, secure and reliable stack consisting of Nginx for serving content (which is largely static, using offline generation), PHP5 in a FastCGI configuration to take care of the dynamic things, and Git + Gitolite as a robust deployment mechanism; including the rebuilding of Jekyll sites when needed.

Bonus: All websites are accessible via IPv6 and most domains have valid AAAA records set up.


App Development and Design

My app portfolio is rather small, but always looking to expand.

IRC Share – Android – 2012

IRC Share is a quick app that I put together to scratch an itch. I'm a regular user of IRC and find myself wanting to share images often.

When combined with "Imgur Android" for uploading, sharing the resulting URL is as easy as sharing directly to "IRC Share".

Mobile Balance NZ – Android – 2012

Mobile Balance is another quick itch-scratching app. It periodically pings your carrier's SMS service and reads your current balance from the reply; it then places it into a persistant notification for you to see at any time.

The app is currently compatible with the Vodafone and Telecom networks and should work for prepay and account types.