Steve Webster

Current

• Web Architect at LOVEFiLM

Past

• Front End Architect / Senior Web Developer at Yahoo!
• Head of Development at Featurecreep Ltd
• Web Developer at Dutton Merrifield Ltd

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Education

• City of Bristol College

Recommended

9 people have recommended Steve

Connections

113 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

• My Blog
• My Company

Steve Webster’s Summary

I am a web architect, developer, author, teacher and conference speaker.

I am an experienced web architect specialising in front-end architecture and client-side development. I am passionate about software quality and web standards, accessibility, user experience and good team leadership. As a published author, and with a BCS ACTT training qualification, I have excellent written and oral communication skills.

I have written or contributed to around a dozen books in the field of web development, including most recently Friends of Ed's flagship Foundation ActionScript 3.0 for Flash & Flex, Foundation PHP for Flash and Advanced PHP for Flash. I have also spoken at web technology conferences both internal and external to Yahoo!

In my spare time I develop iPhone applications and games the _tapjunkie_ moniker. See http://tapjunkie.com for more details.

Outside of technology, my main hobby is photography. A collection of my photographs can be found online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spjwebster/

Steve Webster’s Specialties:

Emerging technologies, training, best practices, prototyping, Web Standards, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, REST, Flash, Flex, ActionScript 2 & 3, Adobe AIR, PHP, MySQL, SQLite, Objective-C, performance, accessibility, interaction design

Steve Webster’s Experience

• Web Architect

  LOVEFiLM

  (Privately Held; Entertainment industry)

  December 2009 — Present (1 month)

• Front End Architect / Senior Web Developer

  Yahoo!

  (Public Company; YHOO; Internet industry)

  August 2006 — December 2009 (3 years 5 months)

  In this role I split my time between working as the Front-End Architect for the EU Media engineering team and as the lead front-end developer on our international Developer Tools team.
  
  As the Front-End Architect for EU Media I help define and curate global front-end development best practices and engineering standards related to continuous integration, performance, maintainability, reusability, security, code quality, accessibility and internationalisation. I investigate and evaluate emerging company and publicly available technologies for their adaptability and suitability for front-end development. I am responsible for building prototypes and reference implementations for upcoming platforms, tools and frameworks, and liaising with both technical and non-technical parts of the business. As a British Computing Society ACTT qualified trainer I am also responsible for designing and delivering technical training courses to new and experienced colleagues on a variety of technologies.
  
  As a Senior Front-End Engineer on the Developer Tools team, I lead the front-end development efforts on a number of our core tools and platforms. As both lead front-end developer and interaction designer, I have worked on some of Yahoo's most important CMS systems, bug tracking tools, internationalisation/localisation platforms and release tracking software.
  
  Previous to these roles I have also worked as a front-end developer on both the Yahoo homepage and the My Yahoo personalisable homepage.

• Head of Development

  Featurecreep Ltd

  (Internet industry)

  May 2004 — August 2006 (2 years 4 months)

  As the first employee at Featurecreep I designed and architected an extensible, plugin-based Content Management System that went on to run the websites of all of the company's clients. I was responsible for data model design, database design and the back-end architecture, and then implementing those designs using well-written object-oriented PHP. I also designed and built the equally pluggable Flash-based administration interface, and worked on the front-end code for a number of client sites.
  
  Later as we started to take on more employees and contractors I moved into a Head of Development role where I oversaw all development efforts, both on the core CMS system as well as building the client sites. I documented coding standards and best practices, set up formal software development processes to minimise defects and make sure we were able to communicate effectively with our clients with regards to delivery.

• Web Developer

  Dutton Merrifield Ltd

  (Design industry)

  February 2002 — May 2004 (2 years 4 months)

  After working freelance and writing technical books full-time, my first role in the industry was at Dutton Merrifield, a Bristol-based design agency with clients including 3, Orange, Lloyds TSB and The Number 118-118. As a web developer in a small department, I was responsible for client- and server-side development, liaising with our CMS partners and, towards the end, building a custom bespoke CMS for Dutton Merrifield's clients.

Steve Webster’s Education

• City of Bristol College

  HND , Software Engineering , 2001 — 2003

Additional Information

Steve Webster’s Websites:

• My Blog
• My Company

Steve Webster’s Interests:

Software Architecture, Front-End Development, Accessibility, Interaction Design, Web Standards, Photography

Steve Webster’s Groups:

BCS ACTT Qualified Trainer

•    WSG
•    Yahoo Employees and Alumni Group
•    Adobe Industry Leaders & Innovators
•    London iPhone Developer Group

Steve Webster’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch