Andrew Marvin

Background: The Crocs consent management system is a privacy governance frameworks that undergirds all of Crocs' digital properties. It builds upon Tealium's Consent Preferences Manager to ensure that Crocs is in compliance with global and regional privacy standards such as the GDPR and CCPA. It does this by soliciting user consent and then suppressing any tags or API connections from vendors in consent categories that the user has opted out of.

Features: Last year, I led a project in Tealium to implement a comprehensive consent management system across our sites, bringing Crocs into compliance with global and regional privacy standards. This not only protected our organization from potential legal troubles such as from the GDPR and CCPA data privacy frameworks, but also built trust with our customers who are now fully in control of and understand how we use their PI data to better serve them.

Challenges: Implenting Tealium's consent manager across our 12 different sites within three different regional privacy frameworks required a great deal of customization. Furthermore, working with internal stateholders such as our legal and UX teams challenged me to think about the project from different perspectives. Through effective communication and Agile iteration, I was able to deliver a product that satisfied all our business needs.

Background: VXX Journeys began in 2018 during a Python independent study conducted under Professor Nikjeh at Moorpark College. My goals with the project were to become competent in Django as well to build something that brought value to my organization that I would update, maintain, and use for years to come. The main purpose of the webapp is to document my non-profit organization's bicycle expeditions through Vietnam, a country that I lived in on and off from 2010 through 2020 first as a teacher and then as a freelance programming tutor. Recently, I overhauled the webapp to be responsive, I refactored or removed bad code, and I added routes from our most recent bicycle trip in 2020.

Features: VXX Journeys has two main features. First, it contains filterable Instagram posts plotted onto a map of Vietnam. It achieves this by using Python to query the Instagram API for new posts from the VXX Instagram account and the Leaflet.js library for plotting the images on the map. Second, it allows users to select an individual day from a journey to have the route plotted onto the map. The GPS data is passed asynchronously from the server to the client on demand. An admin dashboard is used to upload new GPS routes for individual ride days as well as to edit any erroneous data pulled from Instagram. The webapp is fully responsive.

Challenges: Throughout the project, there were several noteworthy challenges I faced which turned me into a better developer. When I began back in 2018, I knew very little about database design. Learning my way around the Django ORM taught me to think about data through the lens of object-oriented programming. I've since become much more competent in database design and management. While revamping VXX Journeys this year, I had to convert the database from SQL to Postgres in order to host the site on Heroku. Through this process I learned the nuts and bolts of exporting and loading data from DBMS. Another challenge I faced was the ever-mutating Instagram API. The webapp originally logged in to my account using the Instaloader Python package in order to download posts. However, when ran from a server, this triggered a suspicious login attempt check. To bypass this, I wrote a Selenium script to retrieve the Instagram security code from my Gmail account. However, the API had several limitations such as how it structured its data and what permissions it required to access certain metadata. Furthermore, the image URLs that I would pass to the front-end to be displayed on the map expired after only a few days requiring the script to continuously check for dead links and redownload post metadata. Simply put, it was over-engineered. While the system I built ensured data confidentiality and integrity, I decided that relying on a third party for availability was unacceptable. In order to ensure the long-term stability of the webapp, I decided to refactor my script to download and store Instagram posts locally. Now I can be positive the webapp will always function as intended. This project taught me so much about coding using web frameworks. While I'm not partial to Django specifically, I certainly appreciate the power and speed that comes from leveraging it to quickly prototype project ideas such as VXX Journeys.

Background: mc-dma is the official website for the Moorpark College Graphic and Multimedia Design Program. The main purpose of the site is to serve as a student resource as well as to attract potential students to the program. My work on the website began as a paid internship under Professor Svetlana Kasalovic. My goals in undertaking the internship were to gain professional experience working under a talented project manager, prepare myself for taking on freelance clients, and improve my web design skills. My role was as the primary front-end developer. I worked closely with a graphic design intern to recreate her design in a pixel-perfect, responsive manner.

Features: mc-dma is a Wordpress-based, multi-page static site. It features a homepage, a student work gallery, and several pages with pertinent information and resources for students. The site runs on Wordpress, allowing for school administrators to add future content without the help of a developer.

Challenges: mc-dma had many developers working on it before me, so I had to learn how to jump into older codebases rather than starting fresh. This taught me to integrate the logical thought processes of people I had never met into my problem solving skills. Another challenge I faced was conducting user testing in order to optimize the site. First, I developed and distributed surveys to current stuents in the program to study what they wanted out of the site. I later conducted end-user testing through Hotjar and Google Analytic. This gave me insight into how clients actually used the site. I learned a great deal about UX during this process. Finally, the greatest challenge that I faced was when the site was infected with malware. The previous developers had hosted several of the school's websites on a single server. The infected site, which was not being maintained by a developer, then infected all the sites. I had to go through every PHP file and manually fix the problems. I also ensured that each site had anti-malware protection going forward. The process taught me to never go into an existing project assuming that the previous developers had secured it.