Bio & Contact Information

If you’re interested in hiring me for your next front-end Web site engineering project, please use my contact information below to get in touch with me and get me booked. My professional biography is also listed to give you a bit of background regarding my thirteen years plus career history.

Michael “Mike Nice” Anderson’s Professional Biography

In early 1997, I decided to go freelance with my services under the company name “Broader Than Broadway” and started building out small Web site projects for small businesses and media agencies. The late-’90s Dotcom boom was on at the time and there was all kinds of work to be had building out Web 1.0 applications if you were in the loop. By early-’00 I was 100% dedicated to my freelance projects.

Work was so plentiful during this period that my clients’ multi-media needs started to expand beyond what I was able to independently produce, so I started contracting other developers so I could deliver additional media content such as Flash, 3D-modeling, ASP/SQL, PHP/MySQL, Java and e-commerce capabilities. I would define, estimate and manage projects through to final delivery that would require as many as six sub-contractors for projects that relied on media as varied as online radio stations, video games, Flash e-cards and Web sites, enhanced music CDs and e-commerce Web sites.

After five years of working at a highly frenetic pace, I decided to simplify my professional life and focus on offering one role as my primary service. I chose my strongest talent, and my favorite, knowing I wouldn’t grow tired of providing this service over the course of my professional career: G.U.I. engineering. I “went back to school”, so to speak, and focused on learning how to forego depending on table elements to lay out the designs that my clients now provided me, as well as how to separate the content (XHTML) from the style (CSS).

As semantic XHTML became the en vogue style of writing mark-up, I started picking up more and more work with national media corporations, financial service providers and international advertising agencies. In 2007, one of my clients required interfaces that relied heavily on DOM JavaScript behaviors and A.D.A. compliance. Much of the year was dedicated to learning how to write my own interface-related JavaScripts, CSS and XHTML that would be completely backwards-compatible with whatever content a visitor’s browser was capable of displaying; in the process guaranteeing the page’s content was fully accessible to all, regardless of whether the visitor’s browser is able to view JavaScript, Flash, CSS, or if the visitor is using a screen-reader or a keyboard to access the site’s content.

2008 brought the need to be able to create Ajax-based page updates based on a user’s selections or entries as well as more sophisticated DOM scripting animation techniques. By the end of the year I added the ability to write my own Ajax calls and animate the results by incorporating the Prototype/script.aculo.us library syntaxes into my repertoire, and in early 2009 I’d picked up the jQuery library as I’d begun noticing more of my clients were requesting jQuery over Prototype. The Web sites I was building using these new skillsets were beginning to behave more like Flash movies than traditional Web sites, except backwards-compatible to people not running JavaScript in their Web browser and completely search engine optimized. I noticed that this was becoming more and more important to my clients; what with the popularity of mobile devices like the iPhone and their non support of Flash content.

I enjoy doing what I do for a living very much and I think it shows in the quality of the work that I turn in. If I had to rank my position within the pool of front-end engineers that work within the Toronto area, I’d put myself inside the top 1%. If you hire me to build your project’s G.U.I., you’ll sleep easy in knowing that you’re getting one of the best Toronto has to offer in my field of expertise.