Zane Staggs / Web Developer

PlayFirst, the creator of Diner Dash, creates games for mac, pc, xbox, facebook, iphone, ipad and others.  As a Senior Software Engineer at PlayFirst, my foremost role is the lead of Front-end development and UI of the website.  I worked with a team of designers, marketing folks and other engineers creating dynamic content for the PlayFirst.com website among other duties both back and front-end in a J2EE environment. 

The search pages are ajax powered and employ heavy amounts of cacheing from javascript and the backend to make the page load information fast.  The banner area is dynamic and under full control of marketing and feeds off of the settings in the backend to cycle through as users click on different categories of the website.  Client side sorting and filtering are also included.

The immersive experience pages are a solid example of modern HTML coding and layout.  Several layout techniques were employed to meet the designer's vision pixel perfect while also including some cool functionality as well.  Front and backend coding had to work seamlessly together with advanced css layouts to keep this page working with the same common underlying template and css is used to modify the contents.

I collaborated with the design team and created an HTML5 iPhone version of the playfirst website that uses our existing infrastructure to serve up a completely different experience to iPhone visitors to our website.  The content is pulled from the same sources as the website so the maintenance is low.  There are a few iphone ui components like a sliding carousel and effects to make it feel like a native application as much as possible while keeping true to the PlayFirst branding.