I'm Esten Hurtle
I make websites. Currently, I am enrolled as a Master's student in Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. I plan to graduate in August of 2012.
Professionally, I worked as the lead developer at Learning Web, an e-learning company
based on providing a consistent user experience from phone to desktop. I was also a freelance developer at
Hearst Interactive working as a a recommendation engine. In the summer of 2009, I had an internship
on the product reviews team of PCMag.com,
where I did everything from touch up photos to blog about Google Android.
Of course, that alone doesn't say much. The best way to get an idea of who I am and what I do is to take a look at this site.
About the site
This site is a Django-based custom CMS. I wanted to get better at writing in the Django Python framework, so I decided to redo my portfolio in it. What you see here is the product of nearly ten months of work, four complete redesigns and many hours of lost sleep. Since I started working on this, I practiced way more PHP than Python, so finishing and launching this was an attempt to balance that out a bit.
The site makes extensive use of the jQuery framework for all animations and the like.
Within the next few weeks, I'll be putting a link to a .zip file here with all the code. Given that this was my first Django project when I originally wrote it, the code isn't really too spectacular. But, since then, I've changed a few things around to make it a little better. Because I believe in the idea of open-source technology, I've decided to share it, regardless of my misgivings about its quality.
Also, a big thanks to Justin Myers for helping me with a good deal of this code/debugging, as well as helping me decide I wanted to use Django in the first place.