Ian O'Dea

At Groupon, I function as something of a full-stack developer: My work touches many parts of our stack and is done in many different languages. For several months, I worked on Groupon Now!Groupon Now! is a Backbone-based, API-driven fat client application that allows users to find deals to use right now., and right now I am working on a project that has the potential to redefine the way consumers interact with our website. Besides strictly front-end work, I have contributed to many of the Rails helpers and presenters that we have, and have also written numerous Rspec, Cucumber, and Jasmine tests to ensure that our code functions as intended.

At Celect, I converted PSDs completed by our in-house design team into functioning site layouts using SASS. Beyond that, I also provided DNS supportCelect maintained its own nameserver, allowing us to control clients' DNS records. My duties ranged from doing simple A or CNAME records to configuring mail records and setting up subdomains. for clients by maintaining their DNS records and creating new ones. Additionally, I championed and supported several efforts to improve our proprietary CMS, including increased use of JavaScript interactive elementsWhile this never came to fruition, I do still have the code for the element I used to make this proposal., better mobile compatibilityPlanning for the mobile market, crafting mobile-friendly designs, and using lightweight JavaScript equivalents of common Flash elements will all help your product impress upon mobile users., and tools to tweak the SEOWhen I came in to the company, our system had little to no SEO optimization. My coworker and I spent a lot of time researching best practices and trying to formulate some SEO tools that could be integrated into our system itself to give our clients more effective SEO options. of our sites.

Ian was an absolutely great addition to our company; both as a gifted developer as well as an overall team player... Ian's work shows an ardent ability to both serve as the primary thought leader within a team, or serve in a capacity as collaborative supporter of other projects and initiatives... Ian's approach to work and ability to manage a multitude of projects is rare for any professional developer, particularly from someone as young in their career as Ian.
– JC Garrett

At the Adler Planetarium, I worked on the Education and Public Outreach team for the NASA IBEX mission. My primary duties were to maintain, expand, and reinforce the IBEX website with fresh content, new interactive elementsAt the Adler, I made several interactive elements using JavaScript, ranging from slideshows to image maps with tooltip-style hover effects., and strong multimedia pieces. In addition, I worked on ensuring the 508-compliance508-compliance means (more or less) that everything we put up on the web had to be created in such a way that differently-abled users could have the same access to content that the average user had. This included standard practices like giving images alt attributes and more obscure ones, like tagging PDFs so screenreaders could read text in the proper order. of all the documents and pages on the IBEX website. One project that stands out especially was a data collection systemNASA had its own data collection system, but it was extremely complicated. We did not have the staff to educate everybody we provided materials to in the use of this system, so I was tasked with building our own system so that we could analyze and report the information to NASA ourselves instead. The system was built using a combination of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. I built out that allowed us to capture audience penetration information from the various museums and schools we distributed our educational materials to. This system allowed us to analyze the data ourselves and report our findings back to NASA itself.

Ian was a delight to work with at the Adler. His easygoing manner and willingness to jump in and learn new technology as needed were everything you could want from an intern. He is a quick learner and adept at finding resources that will help advance a project.
– Nancy Ross Dribin

As a freelance designer and developer, I've worked on projects ranging from club fliers and posters to brandingI will very likely never claim to be a branding expert, but I am a stickler for detail, consistency, and flexibility. to personal website development. I specialize in crafting effective information architecturesBreaking the information down in to chunks and organizing them logically without overloading the user is a difficult but extremely rewarding task. Reducing the risk of information overload will keep visitors on your site longer and will also make your CTAs much more effective. and interactive elementsUsing progressive enhancement techniques to enhance pages engages the user and allows you to keep them on your site longer, giving you more opportunities to convert them into leads or even sales. that not only engage users but also bring them a whole new experience.

Ian is a wonderful worker and even better designer. When working with him on developing advertising for a DePaul Linux Community event, Ian was up to the task and the end result was great for our event!
– Jamesha Fisher

Bachelor of Science in Interactive Media
DePaul University
Chicago, IL
2006 – 2010