I am passionate about the accessible web, semantic markup and cascading style sheets. On this website I’ll share some of the projects I’ve worked on and some of my thoughts about earlier mentioned passions. If you want to get in touch, just drop me a line on hi@michaelhastrich.nl or DM me @mchaste on Twitter.
Frontend development, these days, covers so many different skills that I'd like to emphasize what I'm good at and what I care about. If you are looking for someone to help you set up a maintainable and solid codebase, maybe I can help. Below are the things I care most about in my work.
I think it's essential that whoever visits a website or uses an app to do something, is able to do what they came to do. Regardless of their abilities. In practice what that means, is that I try to make my work as accessible as possible. Whether someone uses a keyboard to navigate the website or uses assistive technology like a screenreader, my goal is to make the experience as seamless as possible for as many people as possible. I ensure that by writing clean and semantic markup, keeping an eye on document structure, sticking with native components as much as possible and working closely with designers to come up with solutions that work for everyone.
I like simple solutions that make sense to people. That means I like to keep my tool chain within a project as lean as possible. Do we really need Bootstrap? Why do we write a bunch of mixins that are used only once or twice and nobody understands anymore 2 months later. And if we decide we actually do need them, let's document them as best as we can, so the next developer or our future-selfs at least have an understanding of what the problem was we were solving. Removing 'the magic' from a code base gives me great pleasure.
Making sure your visitors understand what they need to do on your website to get what they came for. That sounds logical. Unfortunately that is not always the case for a lot of digital products that exist today. Of course UX designers play a huge part in this, but I do feel it's my duty as a frontend developer as well to keep a broad view of the elements in a project and how they behave. "We already have something that does something similar. Maybe we could use that, instead of adding a new, slightly different, thing?"
I have had the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers over the years. I speak their "language" and get why details like line-height and white space are important. I understand that sometimes an extra variant of a header is necessary to make a component stand out a bit extra. I love to sit down with designers to discover systems within their ideas and shape those ideas into a design system that we can use in (almost) every context and use-case.
Over the last couple of years I've worked on a variety of projects for clients ranging from design agencies to the national airport and Dutch government. Usually I'm the person working on the HTML and CSS, setting up and maintaining component libraries and safe-guarding usability and accessibility.
KOOP (overheid.nl) is the organisation responsible for Dutch governmental publications and announcements. They maintain and manage a range of websites. To assure a consistent style across these different sites, a component library was created that could be used to build and extend the different websites and maintain a similar look-and-feel across all the different domains.
At the SVB I helped maintain and extend the internal knowledgebase, that is used daily by the Service Team employees who determine if someone is eligble for social security benefits. In the Scrum team I was responsible for maintaining the CSS and HTML. I also worked closely with the backend developers to maintain the CMS and make sure the service, dating back to 2004, remained stable and performant.
For Royal Schiphol Group I worked in one of the four Scrum teams responsible for schiphol.nl, the website for the national airport. As one of the front-end developers responsible for Personal Relevant Information I worked on the online maps and "My Travel Day" parts of the website.
A large part of my time at Schiphol I spend on building the new Component Library that was part of a complete redesign of the website at the beginning of 2018.
ONVZ is a health insurance company in the Netherlands. For Fabrique Amsterdam I was part of the Scrum team responsible for creation of their redesigned website that focuses heavily on user convenience. Part of the website was build using VueJS and together with the frontend developer of Fabrique I build a component library that enables ONVZ to extend their website over the next couple of years.
For Fabrique Delft I helped their Scrum team to build the new website for Delta Lloyd, a Dutch financial service provider. We rebuild a solid component-based frontend, removing Bootstrap from the entire codebase, with a lot of flexibility to accomodate the (backend) developers at Delta Lloyd.
In 2016 Delta Lloyd was acquired by NN Group.
Pharmeon creates digital tools for health care providers, like physiotherapists, dentists, general practitioners and pharmacists. In a multi-install WordPress environment clients can create their own website, easily edit the look-and-feel of the website and manage their content. I helped Pharmeon's development team to create a range of adaptable WordPress themes (templates) for their clients to choose from.