Hey, I'm Weston Richardson !
I am a graduate of Winthrop University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Digital Information Design, and specializing in web applications.
I originally created this site as a way to showcase my programming skills to prospective companies. But times change, and in late 2019 my family and I decided to start a small business by purchasing a franchise. We chose Game Kastle, which is a hobby game and event business. Covid impacted our opening timeframe, but we are now targeting opening our first store in mid-2021. Over time, I’ll be including more info on the business from this page.
For old-times sake, below are links to pages where I utilized different technologies and approaches. The code is stored on GitHub for review if someone is interested.
I hope you find my site an interesting read. Oh, and enjoy the images taken during my personal journey.
In early 2019, I started a project that required me to work with Amazon Web Services in order to code Lambda microservices. Since then I've become familiar with other AWS product offerings. I’ve learned to utilize code using Cloud9, CodeCommit, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, CloudWatch, and SES. After going to an AWS Seminar, I learned to utilize S3 and Route53 for hosting static websites.
In the near future, I plan to continue broadening my AWS knowledge with Coginito, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, and KMS.
For more details about my work with AWS head over here.
I thought it would be important to improve my capabilities with RESTful web services. Since my parents have an online database of their opinons of various craft beers, I decided to create a web service to share their opinions. I did a lot of reading about RESTful web services, and decided to approach the excercise from two directions. First I did a local Java web service following guidance from www.tutorialspoint.com. But the online web service I created against the craft beer MySQL database was a PHP application.
Follow this link to use the web service I wrote that will provide opinions on different craft beers: RESTful Web Service.
I recently created a web service to pull recipes from the database used in the recipe website mentioned below. This web service can be found at Recipe Query
After seeing the interests companies had in developers with an understanding of WordPress customization, I decided to familiarize myself with the tool.
The following is a link to a Travel Blog I created using a WordPress theme. I found a theme that looked interesting to me and decided to customize it using parallax scrolling through css and javascript so that it shared a look and feel with my other webpages. I learned about the basic WordPress capabilities for content management and also the underlying code structures that do everything.
Over the years, my mom has discovered/cooked hundreds of great recipes. She asked me to help her migrate from a paper recipe filing system to an automated one. I decided to use ASP.net, C#, and MySQL as the tools to develop an online application for her. The app allows her to upload PDF copies of recipes, assign tags and ratings to them, and then search based upon the tags.
The app can be found at this link if you want to check it out or look for great recipes. It was fairly straight forward, but since the app was deployed in a cloud server farm, I had to address the dreaded CSRF (cross site request forgery) problem, which gave me some difficulties at the time. The code is stored on my Github folder.
On occasion, I do part-time freelance software development work, and below is a link to some work I did interfacing to a CRM application called Infusionsoft. My task was to develop a website that accepted customer contact information and schedule attendance at upcoming seminars, and then interface the data to Infusionsoft using their API.
Following is a link to a page detailing my experience with the Infusionsoft API.
A while back, my mother had been experimenting with homemade hummus recipes, they were a hit with the family. At the time my dad started talking about sharing them online, and we got the idea for a website.
I decided to develop this "Homemade Hummus" site using tools that I had not been exposed to, in order to learn something new. I chose Ruby-on-Rails and MySQL because it seems to power several well known websites like Twitter, Github, Hulu, and BaseCamp.
Ruby-on-Rails is an MVC framework that does a lot of work for a developer, especially with database interaction.
Following is a link to a page detailing my experience with Ruby-on-Rails: Homemade Hummus
I developed my first website in the summer of 2012, after finishing studies at Greenville Technical College. The website showcased a collection of programming techniques I learned while there. The site still exists, but is very rudimentary compared to my capabilities today. Still, I'll link to it below to show some other programming that I've done previously.