My code

My employ­ment

Information Catalyst was my most recent employer — a small-ish software company in Cheshire. We did a range of activities, mainly towards European Commission R&D initiatives.

I collaborated on a system for managing factory processes, for which I used front-end web technologies, TypeScript, and some PostgreSql, Java, and MySql. The TypeScript I wrote is for four OpenAPI-compliant collections of web endpoints using Nest.js, and for a front-end (my first Angular project) that calls two of those APIs. It’s been an exciting challenge!

I also developed a Windows Forms program that uses C# and the MS Office Interop API to process Word documents. This helped keep my company’s reports looking professional, I found the work enjoyable, and I’ve learnt a lot through it!

In my first 21 months at Information Catalyst, I completed a Level 4 Software Developer apprenticeship.

Do you have a role I could fill? You can contact me on LinkedIn!

Develop­ing this website

DuncanRitchie.co.uk is a handcoded static site written in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

To keep the site lightweight, I’m serving only one font, serving compressed images in newer formats such as WebP (with fallbacks for older browsers), and not using client-side–rendering libraries such as React.js.

To make the site more fun and distinctive, it has two different layouts that can be switched between, if your screen is wide enough and your browser supports intersection observers (and if you’re not on this current page). Both layouts have the picture for each section on the left-hand side, but on one layout the picture has a diagonal edge that the text stays aligned with by shifting to the left or right as you scroll.

I have kept it accessible to users of assistive technologies by using semantic HTML, by giving the text a decent font size and contrast, and by ensuring the site can be navigated by keyboard, among other practices.

There are still improvements I want to make to this site, but so far I think it’s looking pretty good. I’ve learnt a lot in developing it.

For all the code, and a readme file giving more detail, see GitHub.

velut — a Latin rhyming diction­ary

If you know Latin and you’re interested in writing rhyming poetry or lyrics in that language (and who isn’t???), you might just be interested in a website I started in the summer of 2019.

Go to velut.co.uk, type in a Latin word, click “Search!”, and you’ll be returned rhymes (or other word lists), information about the lemmata that the word is a form of, and links to other online dictionaries. There are other features, too, such as an “Advanced” search that returns words that match a given sequence of letters or syllable lengths.

I started collecting the data during my time at uni, where I was studying Latin. It began as an Excel file to store Latin words and return detailed information on them, including definitions, cognates, anagrams, and rhymes. The formulae got very complex.

After I learnt to code with web languages, I made a website for it. It became my first project integrating with any sort of database (I chose MongoDB). The front-end uses React.js, now within the Next.js framework. Details can be found on velut’s about page and velut’s “readme” file, and the code for the velut website is on GitHub.

I continued to use Excel for managing velut and storing all the data, which I frequently imported to the database for the website. But I’m gradually weaning myself off my Excel file, by creating webpages and scripts that replicate its functionality. (And the data are now in Json files.) It’s a very ambitious undertaking, due to both the number of Latin words I’ve collected and the breadth of velut’s capabilities.

How I got into coding

I have always been interested in getting computers to do neat stuff.

I taught myself a lot of advanced MS Excel functionality, in the development of sophisticated personal projects, including a Latin rhyming dictionary which I mentioned above.

My formal education in the field began in January 2019, when I enrolled at Code Nation — a twelve-week bootcamp where I learnt HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, including React.js, Node.js, and Express.js. For instance, I designed and built this site, though it looked a lot different then. The group work we did was a nice taster of being part of a team.

Some of my projects are linked below. I am particularly pleased with my chess game, and my contributions to group projects.

After graduating from Code Nation, I developed my Latin Excel file into a proper website, and started with Information Catalyst on an apprenticeship. This entailed another twelve weeks at Code Nation, from August to October 2019, learning Java and MySql.

In my spare time, I do more coding. Occasionally I make my own little C# apps, but I keep embellishing this website and my Latin website.