Isa Chen

Full-Stack Web Developer and Web Designer

European Commission - SDG Innovation Portal

SHOUT is a web portal funded by the European Commission. The portal aims to strengthen innovation capacity within the EU while keeping aligned with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. My responsibilities are:

  • Advise and collaborate with partners on the tech stack, given the content team's requirements
  • Developing a custom theme in WordPress
  • Developing custom plugin modules for WordPress to enable visual editing of the site's landing pages

Plain Concepts - Microsoft Partner

At Plain Concepts, I worked on various web projects, mostly commissioned by Microsoft. Some of my work included:

  • React frontend for Sidra, a data lake platform built on Azure
  • React frontend for Gen Studio, an interface letting users play with deep learning techniques and images from the MET's collection
  • NodeJS based testing engine, Webhint IO, an opensource initiative by the OpenJS foundation
  • VueJS frontend for Vector Search, an interface used to demo Bing's ANN algorithms for image search

CodeWorks - Immersive Coding Bootcamp

Codeworks is one of Europe's most highly-rated software development boot camps. Over 50% of students who attend Codeworks have a STEM background in computing, physics or finance. They attend Codeworks to learn the very marketable skill of software development. My responsibilities were:

  • Lectures on the fundamentals of JavaScript
  • Lectures on how to solve algorithmic problems (the phone screen interview type, not the ones on Scott Aaronson's blog)
  • One on one help with the student's projects, mostly in React, NodeJS and NoSQL databases
  • CSS help requests. Lots of them.

United Nations - ICTY

At the UN-ICTY, I spearheaded their online communications efforts on their website and social media channels. My tasks were:

  • Help maintain their Drupal website
  • Creating interactive components with vanilla JavaScript/jQuery for the website
  • Writing content for the website
  • Writing press releases for the media
  • Providing tech training to other staff

The Next Crossing - Travel Consultancy

The Next Crossing is my travel website with over 25k views per month. As travel is a very crowded space on the internet, the challenge with this project is the SEO optimisation of both the theme and the content. After a great deal of optimisation, some of my articles rank organically on page one of Google Search for competitive search terms. Some of my responsibilities include:

  • Design of the website using Sketch
  • Custom theme development with WordPress
  • Custom plugin development
  • Technical SEO optimisation
  • SEO optimised content writing