Kait Sykes 💫
I’m a developer, designer, mentor, and really good creative thinker.
As a Digital Developer and Designer at the Royal Ontario Museum, I hang out with dinosaur bones and code cool things in the basement under them. Before that, I worked at House of Anansi Press and Groundwood Books as an eBook developer, which was my gateway drug to learning code.
I believe well-commented code should be mandatory for every developer and a walk around the block will fix just about any coding problem. My current toolkit includes HTML5, CSS3, Sass, JavaScript, jQuery, React, Node.js, PHP, Drupal, WordPress, and Adobe Creative Suite.
When I’m not coding, I’m probably fostering rescue dogs or working on reading 100 books every year. I’m also fond of piney trees and winter, excellent typography, objectively terrible country music, and — much to my chagrin — the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Projects
ROM Spiders Microsite
Built on Drupal and utilizing vanilla JavaScript and PHP, this microsite was the primary digital marketing tool for the Spiders exhibition at the ROM. I was responsible for development and created the design based on a pre-existing exhibition microsite template.
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Drupal
- Design
ROM Iris van Herpen Microsite
This promotional microsite, built for the Iris van Herpen exhibition at the ROM, was developed using Drupal, PHP, and vanilla JavaScript. I developed and designed the site based on a microsite template.
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Drupal
- Design
ROM Annual Report
A digitization of the ROM’s 2016-2017 Annual Report, I took on this project from another employee and finessed the design and development. Built with PHP.
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Design
ROM WPY microsite
I developed and designed the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 microsite using Drupal, PHP, JavaScript, and jQuery. This project was a refresh of the 2016 designed based off the assets from 2017’s contest winners.
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Drupal
- Design
Laundry Lessons
A digital laundry helper providing explanations for the icons on your clothing tags, this project is built using React, React Router, and Firebase. It also uses the Google Maps JavaScript API and the Google Places API to locate nearby laundromats. I designed and coded everything, although the laundry advice is mostly from my mother.
- React
- JavaScript
- ES6
- API/AJAX
- Git
- Gulp
- Design
Pottergalore
Built using React and React Router, this project is a play on Pottermore’s Harry Potter quizzes. Created in partnership with Natalie Kwok, we each worked on the design and development of this project. I was also responsible for writing the quizzes.
- React
- JavaScript
- ES6
- Git
- Gulp
- Design
Herd of Words
This jQuery cow-themed lorem ipsum generator was a project created just-for-fun with Kitty Yau. We each worked on the design, development, and the giant list of cow words.
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- ES6
- Git
- Gulp
- Design
The Beauty Log
A web app showcasing various makeup looks and the products used to create them, this project was coded with jQuery and relies on the Makeup API. Built by a four-person team, I was largely responsible for responsive design and development.
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- ES6
- API/AJAX
- Git
- Gulp
