Portfolio | NTM Tech

About Me

My name is Khachik Chris Asipyan and I am currently attending California State University of Los Angeles. Among many hobbies, freehand pencil drawing and website development are my main interests. I am also very familiar with operating systems, computer networking, and the Internet. As an artist I enjoy being able to merge my artistic skills with my website design skills to create both practical and visually compelling websites. I create websites that have high-quality content, are easy to update, have minimum download time, and are easy to use.

PHP and mySQL has been at the heart of most of my websites and provides a dynamic environment in which information and data are easily shared. Since PHP is a server-side technology it does not effect how a website is viewed on multiple browsers and multiple operating systems allowing the website to be viewed by as many people as possible. I am also familiar with JavaScript to some extent and use it along side with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to create an easy to use and appealing interface.

Although I can hand code my websites I use Dreamweaver as my primary editor. Using Dreamweaver enables me to speed through the common procedures of building a website and leaves me time to focus on the more custom aspects such as server side scripting and database designing.

Other Interests

Linux Operating system customization

Trying out new Linux distributions is very enlightening and fun, but taking it a step further and customizing the Linux x-window-system and the overall functionality of the operating system is very exciting. I have learned how to customize many window managers to design themes and add extra functionality and features to them. I have created scripts for applications such as Fluxbox, Blackbox, and Conky, which is a tool that displays important system information on the desktop.

Network and Server Setup

I enjoy installing and configuring various networked computers and other devices. Recently, I built a new energy efficient server using a very small Pico-ITX motherboard housed in a 5.5 x 4.2 inch casing. I used the fast Debian 5.0 operating system to run various services such as, FTP, Apache, Subversion, and MySQL. This setup allowed me to have a full time, energy efficient server that I can use at home. Actually, my portfolio website (this site) is being served from this computer. Pico-ITX Motherboard

Sketching

Sketching and drawing has been a hobby since I was a child. Every now and then I pick up a pencil and sketch whatever image comes to mind. Over the years I have become exeptionally good at drawing and I have been complimented many times on my artistic work. In web design, my drawing skills allow me to naturally build appealing and themed user interfaces using graphics and CSS.

Skills

End user interactivity is a very important part of creating websites that users will enjoy using. A good website layout will enhance the interactive experience of a visitor. I take an artistic approach, combining color themes, layouts, and powerful widgets/controls to create easy to use and appealing websites.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a powerful style sheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XHTML. I have a lot of experience in CSS and know how to implement it such that websites are presented consistently across browsers.

Adobe Photoshop is the leading graphics editing program in the market. I use Photoshop often to create the various logos, backgrounds, charts, and the overall style in my websites.

I have used JavaScript extensively in many websites and Adobe Air applications.

The AJAX technique is very practical and convenient which allows web developers to create rich client-side web applications that feel more like desktop applications. I have used the AJAX technique in many websites to create fully dynamic interactive and powerful applications.

Ext JS is a JavaScript library for building interactive web applications, I have used Ext JS in web applications such as Bookposter and E7 GIS Portal

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library. I have used jQuery in lightweight websites to avoid writing lengthy JavaScript code and to implement simple animation in pages.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. I have used the JSON notation to easily transfer data from the client-side to the server-side and back. JSON can be used to interchange data between many languages such as C, C++, C#, JAVA, Python, PHP, etc...

PHP is a very popular and powerful server-side technology which was designed for producing dynamic web pages. Almost all websites I have worked on use PHP.

Many of the websites I have worked on need to interact with databases. Using the very comprehensive mysqli extension in PHP, I have run advanced queries, stored functions, and stored procedures.

A production product I recently worked on, E7 GIS Portal, required us to frequently connect to Oracle databases and run various queries. Using PHP we created object oriented scripts which allowed us to transfer data back and forth with dedicated Oracle database servers.

PHPExcel consists of PHP classes which enables viewing, creating, and modifying Microsoft Excel files. I have used PHPExcel to create instant and dynamic spreadsheets for users to download.

Using the GD library, I have created and manipulated image files. For example: If there is a folder of image files in different sizes and different formats that need to be uniformly displayed in a website, I can use the GD library to resize them and change their format on the fly and display them while preserving the original files.

Using Microsoft Visual Studio, I have created many applications over the years such as console, service, form based, WPF, and Silverlight applications.

Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop, and mobile applications. We use Silverlight to integrate multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment such as the e7 Green Kiosk web application.

I have plenty of experience designing and using relational databases to build database driven websites such as E7 GIS Portal and Bookposter . I design databases with encapsulation in mind, were the data is only accessible by stored procedures and functions. Encapsulation of the data prevents arbitrary queries from being made if the website was to be cracked. Using stored procedures and functions also has many other benefits such as easy modification of the database without having to rewrite code in the website and vice versa.

MySQL Workbench is an amazing tool that allows users to visually design a database. Using the ER diagramming ability of this tool, I have built efficient databases for use primarily in high traffic websites. This tool also allows me to create views, stored procedures, and stored functions during the design phase of a database.

The MySQL GUI Tools provide a suite of desktop applications for the administration of MySQL instances and for building and manipulating the data within MySQL databases.

phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the World Wide Web. I use phpmyadmin for administrative tasks such as, creating/editing user permissions and creating views over a ssl connection.

I have experience configureing various services such as FTP, SSH/SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SVN, and various others. I primarily have experience with Linux based systems but I have also configured Windows Server operating systems as well.

On Linux and UNIX operating systems, I have setup and configured Apache to serve websites via HTTP and HTTPS. I also have experience with setting up virtual hosts and modules such as subversion (dev_svn) and PHP.

Pure-FTPd is a free, secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server. It also has the ability for setting up virtual users, virtual quotas, SSL, etc...

Subversion is a version control system which is used to maintain current and historical versions of files. I use subversion on my Linux server to maintain my source code and documents. I have integrated subversion into Apache using the dav_svn module and created various users to access the system over a SSL connection.