Martin Silha

Full-Stack Software Engineer

About Me

Hello there! I am a software developer from Chicago, Illinois. My experience began in a long time ago in high school managing a website for a club I was in for three years. It was mostly modification of a template in both HTML and CSS and dancing all around cPanel. I didn't realize how much being familiar with many coding concepts would help me when I finally decided to formalize my skills while completing General Assembly's 420-Hour Software Engineering Immersive program! I got a very deep dive into JavaScript which was my biggest blind spot in web development. I hope to contribute to your business with efficient and purposeful code!

portfolio image for ER Air

ER Air

This has been where the majority of my time since graduating my bootcamp has been spent. ER Air is my first client as a freelance software engineer! Their primary focus is on SEO and digital marketing. They came to me with a WordPress site already established, but with their strong focus on SEO I decided the best course of action was to get off of WordPress. Why? In anticipaion of Google's Core Web Vitals update currently being rolled out, the site basically had no chance competing with a site built directly in HTML/CSS/JS.

The site was approaching one million lines of code with so many unnecessary scripts, stylesheets and divs within divs within divs...which was simply just overkill for a small static website. What made it even worse was there wasn't a single drop of metadata amongst these nearly million lines of code, which is quite necessary for basic SEO. Lighthouse overall scores preceding the takeover were running around 23 and 45 on mobile and desktop. It is now scoring between 95-100 for mobile and desktop. There are many improvements to come but I also can't wait to see how these changes affect their search ranking over the next few months!

portfolio image for Football Head

Football Head

Football Head was the final project of General Assembly's Software Engineering Immersive program. It is a MERN-Stack single-page application using JWT Token user authorization. It also leverages a third-party API from ESPN Fantasy Football. This project actually started as an Excel spreadsheet many years ago and can be seen as part of my motivation to learn programming as I was getting tired of entering the data manually and wanted a solution. The potential for continual improvement to this application is boundless in my eyes. How it works is that it will make an API call based on every season your fantasy football league has played, add the data from another API call for each season and have it accessed later when it is compiled and rendered through visualizations and such. As of now I have got some basic visualizations using Recharts going and will be expanding to more interesting data points and conclusions in the near future. Test credentials and more technical documentation can be found on each respective GitHub repository.

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Doctor Express

Doctor Express was the project required after the second unit of the program. The requirements were to create an application using the MEN-Stack with full CRUD capability. My app centered around the idea of a portal for doctor-to-patient and patient-to-doctor communications after a couple of situations involving information moving too quickly and also too slowly. The user can create, read, update, and delete all notes and medications attached to their user profile. This app also implements Google OAuth authentication as the sole sign-in option.

portfolio image for Splash Music

Splash Music

Splash Music was the third project completed during GA's Software Engineering Immersive program. It was the one and only group project, and also the one and only Python and Django project. Using another object-oriented language with a different syntax really helped solidify the use of objects in my mind. The group utilized a mob programming approach over Zoom. We would have one driver with the rest navigating in order to avoid any problems with merge conflicts whatsoever. A few roles were handed out in the beginning of the project, in which I was GitHub manager, meaning I got to handle merging pull requests and kept everybody in sync along the way. Overall, the project went well, fulfilled all the requirements and we maintained a great chemistry along the way.

portfolio image for WAR!

WAR!

This was the very first project in the program! We got to select from a list of games and I selected the card game War. The point of the project was to use JavaScript for it's dynamic and logical nature for the first time. The game is user vs CPU, where the user can click their card to battle with the CPU. The player with the higher card wins and takes the cards! If the cards are equal in value, it results in a war! Two more cards are layed down and the second card drawn determine the next battle! If those cards are the same...it will lead to more war! The winner then collects all the cards involved. It even comes with some fun sounds!