Kevin Yank Curriculum Vitae

Kevin Yank is a respected figure in the web development field. He has over a decade’s industry experience in both front-end and back-end development, with particular emphasis on PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. A skilled team leader, he has run a six-person development team, has planned technical strategy in close collaboration with marketing and business managers, and maintains an excellent record of deadlines met and business objectives achieved. A talented communicator, he is the author of three successful books, hosted the weekly SitePoint Podcast for over two years, and has been an invited speaker at industry conferences around the world.

Kevin joined the SitePoint Group (an online media company with sub-brands including 99designs and Flippa) shortly after its founding in 2001, and served as SitePoint’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO) from 2008 through 2010. He spent 2011, his final year at the SitePoint Group, working on e-learning start-up Learnable as Chief Instructor.

In January 2012, Kevin joined Avalanche Technology Group (parent company of AVG (AU/NZ)) as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), managing internal and customer-facing IT and development, technology strategy and partnerships.

Kevin is a web and general software developer with deep and diverse experience across many languages and platforms, including Ruby on Rails, Django on Python, PHP, MySQL, Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML and their respective libraries and frameworks, and with a constant focus on best practices.

Achievements

• implemented development environments and deployment tools for publishing web applications using Amazon Web Services (EC2 & S3) from the GitHub code versioning service, architected for high scalability and availability (2008 – present)
• designed and implemented an end-to-end authoring, editing, styling, and publishing tool chain for print (PDF) and electronic (EPUB) books powered by Ant, and based on DocBook XML, XSLT, and XSL-FO (2003 – present)
• adapted a Python web application to work seamlessly within a PHP-based online courseware application (2010)
• planned and implemented an online developer reference for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using PHP, DITA, and XSLT (2008 – 2009)
• designed and implemented a WYSIWYG HTML editor component by extending the standard Java Swing GUI APIs (2002 – 2003)

Kevin is a skilled development team leader and project manager, with many years of industry experience planning projects with marketing and business managers to address and achieve company objectives and then leading their execution, often to ambitious deadlines in a distraction-rich environment.

Achievements

• project managed and led a team of six for eight months, taking the SitePoint Courses product offering from conception to proof-of-concept product launch, and then onto a from-scratch design and implementation under a new brand, Learnable (2010 – present)
• project managed and led a development team of three for six months, preparing for the extraction of a website auction marketplace from SitePoint to create a new business, Flippa (2009)
• led recruitment and conducted interviews of candidates for front- and back-end web developer positions within the SitePoint group of companies (2005 – present)
• completed and delivered regular employee performance reviews for developers within managed teams (2009 – present)
• developed rigorous personal productivity processes, which have led to a reputation for extreme dependability

Kevin is a talented technical writer, and has produced hundreds of thousands of words of bright and engaging prose covering myriad web design and development tips, techniques, and technologies. From the very beginnings of his career, Kevin has been passionate about sharing his skills through writing.

Achievements

• contributed countless articles, blog posts, and issues of the SitePoint Tech Times email newsletter (~250,000 subscribers) to SitePoint’s library of web design and development content (2002 – 2010)
• co-wrote Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong! (2008)
• co-wrote Simply JavaScript, and performed expert review of co-author’s material for same (2007)
• performed expert review and rewrites on SitePoint’s second book, HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS (2003)
• wrote SitePoint’s first ever printed book, Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL. Now in its fourth edition (released in 2009), the book has sold well over 25,000 copies (2002 – 2009)

Kevin is a truly gifted communicator, with a natural ability to teach complex technical skills in a clear and charming way, in almost any setting, to audiences from one to over three thousand.

Achievements

• delivered PHP Live with Kevin Yank, an online course (with lessons made up of video, screencasts, articles, and more) to over 2,000 online students in its initial three-week run (2010)
• delivered JavaScript Live with Kevin Yank, an online course to over 3,000 online students in its initial three-week run (2010)
• delivered a 1.5 day JavaScript training workshop to corporate developers in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Brisbane for Max Design (2010)
• presented a one-hour talk, CSS Frameworks: Make the Right Choice, as an invited speaker at the Web Directions South (Sydney) and Edge of the Web (Perth) conferences (2009)
• presented a one-hour talk, Coping with the New Web on the Server Side, as an invited speaker at the Fundamentos Web conference in Spain (2006)
• co-presented a one-hour talk, JavaScript APIs & Mashups, as an invited speaker at the Web Directions South (Sydney) conference (2006)

Kevin performs improvised theatre with Impro Melbourne, and serves in a volunteer capacity as the Vice President of the company’s Committee of Management (and its sole web developer). Kevin is also an unabashed Apple fan.