Let me introduce myself.

I'm Peter, a self-taught full-stack web developer, keen gardener, artist and father of two.

I was born in the Solomon Islands, spent my high school years in the Netherlands and have lived in Melbourne, Australia since 1998.

In the early 2000s I was working as a video editor when I discovered web development. In my spare time, I created a website to help people reconnect with people they had met on their travels. A "Friends Reunited for Travel" you might call it. Ultimately, that morphed into a blogging platform, travel forum and trip mapping system that over a million members have signed up to since its inception.

That site is Travellerspoint.

Since then I have also branched out to work on several other projects. I have worked on various popular travel websites: I Want That Flight; I Know The Pilot; and Travel Massive. I have also written several Wordpress plugins for WP Charitable - a popular suite of charity fundraising plugins. More details on these projects can be found in this portfolio.

My favourite part of developing websites is ensuring the user experience is as simple as possible for users. Form should follow function. I take great satisfaction in creating an interface that feels intuitive and simple while also being attractive.

I enjoy learning new technologies and frameworks, and particularly enjoy working in Javascript. I continually strive to learn new skills, languages through reading, podcasts and of course by programming.

Aside from getting stuck into code, I also enjoy gardening, drawing and painting. I've added a short section with some of my art.

Since 2002, Travellerspoint has been one of the web's most enduring travel communities. A popular forum, blogging platform and mapping system keep attracting new travellers to the platform. The site counts over a million members.

The backend is a combination of Lucee (an open source version of ColdFusion), NodeJS, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, MariaDB and Redis.

The front end utilises Vue for the more complex areas (eg.. the mapping tool). I learned a lot about creating scalable websites, keeping users happy and the many challenges faced when launching a new product.

Travel Massive is a large community of travel industry professionals. I helped at various stages of a redevelopment from 2020 to 2022.

Initially I worked over a couple of weeks closely with the founder, Ian, on a prototype built in Vue.js.

The decision was eventually made to use the Phoenix framework and I helped with various aspects of this, learning Elixir along the way.

Among other things, I developed a CMS for any of the various landing pages needed on the site. It allows easy adding of Tailwind styled HTML to the site including some reusable blocks to reduce duplication.

I also did a lot of work on the UX of the site.

I Want That Flight is a popular flight meta search engine largely targetted at the Australian market.

I have worked on a freelance basis on various parts of the website since 2017. Some of the things I've worked on over this time include

• A full revamp of the front end to ensure the design was responsive and attractive to a modern audience.
• Chrome extensions to help with finding flight deals
• An admin interface to assist with sending out daily flight deal summary emails
• Developing a flight search widget for use by affiliate partners
• Adjusting the site to allow for white labeling by affiliates

I Know The Pilot is Australia's favourite flight deals site. Every day new deals are sent out to hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

I have helped develop this site in numerous ways.

• Designed and implemented the web front end
• Built a standalone API that handles the sending of emails to the subscribers
• Created a dashboard to monitor campaign progress
• Designed Email templates for deals

WP Charitable is a popular Wordpress plugin built to help non-profits with their online fundraising efforts.

I helped with various projects on WP Charitable over a 2 year period. Some of the highlights include:

• Developing a plugin integrating WP Charitable with Square
• Developing a plugin integrating WP Charitable with WooCommerce
• A redevelopment of the payment UX to allow more flexible use of different payment gateways
• Developing a plugin to allow tips to be added to donations.
• Developing a plugin to integrate Charitable with Payrexx

Wherdle is my take on the daily game concept popularised by Wordle.

In Wherdle you are presented with 5 travel photos of a mystery location. Your job is to guess the mystery place.

I chose to build this project in Svelte. It uses LocalStorage to keep track of your results and build up stats over time. The photos and daily game are fetched from Travellerspoint. I created a backend to handle picking photos for each location.

Occasionally I like to pick up a pencil, paint brush or fineliner and create some art.

I'll include a few of my works here, but you can find a larger collection over at my Instagram account - @daamsie_art