From a purpose-driven standpoint, Vita is a landing page for my personal curriculum vita. I initially created Vita to link out to different social media channels because (1) it's great for SEO to link in both directions (try Googling 'Jan Michael Wallace', and see if this site is a top hit ... or at least close, depending on your algorithm), and (2) I thought I'd let those channels do the heavy lifting in showcasing media feeds that demonstrate my talents.
Creatively, Vita is meant to be a fun nod to a great one-line ad, featuring the text ... "Take me to your end user," with a blinking cursor, depicting the likeness of a computer screen, and a nod to some old-school sci-fi movies ... think "follow the white rabbit," and, "take me to your leader." The message illustrates my passion for user-centric design ... and humor.
Lastly, Vita is always in "flux." I leverage this project as a way of keeping my skills sharp. Most recently, from a code standpoint, Vita interfaces with a variety of APIs ...
... all to track real-time data about me, including the current music I'm listening to, weather in my area (via what shoes and jacket I might be wearing, etc.), and what I'm currently reading. Vita always tells you how many commits it's taken to build it to date, and I plan to add more features over time, as ideas come to me (there are a few below). If you take a look at the codebase in the JavaScript directory, you'll see that all of this has been written in a modularly succinct way with modern JavaScript best practices and syntax. You may notice that I've achieved the following ...
- Arrays and other objects are used to store and retrieve information that is displayed on the page.
- Data that is stored in arrays and objects, is analyzed and displays information about it in your app.
- Factory and data-retrieval functions that accepts two or more input parameters and returns a value that is calculated or determined by the data from an API
- Data that is easily consumed by its audience (via text which can be read by a screen reader)
- Data retrieved from a third-party API and used it to display something.
- Making the landing page look more like a screen with some CSS styling, and having, "Take me to your end user, " type itself out in an animation upon initial load
- After initial type out (above) ... add this animation ... Text glitch animations
- Medium API output to display my most recent article once I get some content up .. ¯!_(ツ)_/¯
- Geo-location tracking (trying to decide if I really want people to have the ability to follow my coordinates, call me paranoid :-0)
... when will this happen? Who's to say?