Hi there and happy holidays!

First, let me extend a warm welcome back to the blog. It’s been far too long since my last post, and for that, I owe you an explanation. Life and work have kept me on my toes, leaving little room to nurture this space as much as I would like. However, exciting developments are on the horizon, and I’m thrilled to share a glimpse of what’s been happening behind the scenes and what’s coming next.

Status update on my life as a Rydoo’er

A significant chunk of my time has been dedicated to my work at Rydoo, where we’ve been hard at work on a complete overhaul of our website and branding. The new version of the site is now live, and I’m proud to say it’s a significant leap forward. We’ve launched the updated website in six languages, ensuring that our message resonates globally. This project has been a labor of love—a culmination of meticulous planning, collaboration, and execution. From refreshing the brand identity to fine-tuning the multilingual user experience, every detail has been a step toward creating a platform that reflects the Rydoo mission.

Freelance work and supporting the developer community

Beyond Rydoo, I’ve kept busy with freelance projects that have pushed my skills to new levels. You can find some of them on the Websites section. And of course, is also part of my freelance work, to actively support the frameworks and plugins I developed, such as: Mr.Utils and Mr.Dev’s Framework. These tools have been instrumental for users and developers, and ensuring they’re running smoothly and efficiently has been a priority. Whether it’s updating documentation, providing technical support, or rolling out new features, I’m deeply committed to empowering the developer community and, as a result, empower our clients and authors too.

Taking my music hobby to new heights

On a more personal note, I’ve been channelling my creative energy into my music hobby. Music has always been a passion of mine, but over the past few months, I’ve taken it to a new level. I got new guitar pedals that added a lot of new sounds and opened up exciting possibilities for my unique sound. I’m exploring ways to integrate my love for music into future projects, so check my new songs on my personal Instagram and Youtube, and stay tuned for updates on that front.

A web developer status update: new project in the works

Perhaps the most exciting update is a new web development project I’ve been quietly working on. While I can’t share too many details just yet, I’m confident it will be a game-changer in its niche. This project represents months of research and planning, using newer technologies, and I’m eager to unveil it soon. And once I do, it’s likely that I’ll have a lot more to add to this blog.

The blog’s future

With this new project set to launch, I’m planning to bring the blog back to life. My vision for this space is evolving, much like my personal and professional endeavours. I’m looking forward to sharing more in-depth insights, tutorials, and updates as I embark on this next chapter. The blog will once again become a hub for tech enthusiasts, developers, and anyone who enjoys the journey of learning and creating.

Wrapping up the web developer status update

If you’ve been following the blog over the years, thank you for your patience and support. This journey has been filled with growth, challenges, and opportunities, and I’m grateful to have you here. The hiatus was necessary, but it’s paved the way for an exciting future.

As we prepare to welcome 2025, I’m filled with anticipation and motivation. There’s so much to share, and I’m eager to make this blog a vibrant, informative, and inspiring space once again. Here’s to a new year filled with creativity, innovation, and meaningful connections.

Stay tuned for updates, until then, let’s celebrate Christmas and start 2025 with the right footer!
🎅 🎄 🎁 🥂

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Hi there! I’m Marcos, I was born in 1991 in Lisbon (Portugal) and I’m a web developer.

About my work experience

Web Developer

I’ve been working professionally as a Web Developer since 2014.

You can find me on:

• Github
• LinkedIn

Eventcluster

I started in a internship at Eventcluster for 6 months. There I worked on a already developed event booking platform as web content manager and junior developer. I optimized and helped the platform reach almost 800 results on the many sectors.

Browserbox

Then I moved to Browserbox (The company that developed the Eventcluster platform) where I developed around 40 Joomla websites as web developer during almost 5 years.

Freelancer

I also started activity as freelancer, where I developed:

• Some WordPress websites, most of them in collaboration with itemzero studio.
• My own front-end toolkit called Mr.Utils.
• Plugins labeled Mr.Dev. – Theme Framework , Widget and Module.
• The plugin editor4roks.
• This website with blog and client area.

Rydoo

And since March 2020 I’ve been working at Rydoo with the Marketing Team, developing new landing pages on the website and Hubspot.

About my academic education

You can find me on:

• Behance

Graphic Design

From 2010 to 2013, I did a bachelor in Graphic Design at Escola Superior de Artes e Design in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal (ESAD.CR)

Web Design

Then I did a one year post-graduation in Web Design, at Escola Superior de Tecnologias e Artes in Lisbon, Portugal (ESTAL)

There I was introduced to the essentials of coding in HTML, CSS, jQuery, Javascript and PHP and the final project was to apply that knowledge to develop a website from scratch, also developing a small back-end for it.

And still studying

My interest in coding continues to grow since then and I’ve been self-learning and modernizing my knowledge in this vast and rapidly changing area. Also adding knowledge in Sass, Twig, Blade and more recently React.

About my personal interests

I love music and I compose my own songs!

You can find me on:

• Bandcamp
• Soundcloud
• Youtube
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Bandcamp
• YouTube

I started playing guitar when I was in high-school and I immediately wanted to make my own songs and to be able to sing while playing. With love and patience I was able to achieve that and I shared my songs on-line and did some concerts. I was also part of a small band during high-school and part of a crazy funny band in college, called Die Kiri.

I was very influenced by artists such as Hyde, The Doors, Nick Cave, Led Zeppelin, Diabo na Cruz, B fachada, PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Tenacious D and more. You might find me covering some of their songs.

Unfortunately, nowadays I don’t have so much time to compose new songs but my love for music is always with me. I still find excitement knowing more about my favorite artists, watching concerts and recording some riffs and lyrics.

Other interests

Travelling

I love travelling specially with the people closer to me.

Dining out

I love simple things, like dining out or have a nice drink with friends.

Favorite series, movies and games

I enjoyed a lot the Twin Peaks series and really any movie from David Lynch.

In terms of animated series and movies: Evangelion (first time I watched it entirely was trough eMule, anyone remembers it? lol)

In terms of games the epic Nier: Automata. To play on-line my guilty-pleasure is Rocket League.

Comments

Portfolio and eCommerce website developed for Itemzero, a design studio specialized in the intersection between technology, information design and editorial design.

This project is heavily powered by Mr.Dev. and it’s the perfect showcase of what is possible to do when combining his framework with his frontend toolkit.

The framework allowed the use of the block editor on WooCommerce product pages.
The frontend toolkit (Mr.Utils) allowed to make specific customizations and to easily use components such as sliders and tabs inside the block editor.

And because this website uses those plugins that I developed, some other plugins that I selected and because I manage this website’s server + domain, Itemzero’s score on Google Pagespeed Insights shows excellent results.

Fazer is a new Portuguese magazine about design, their eCommerce website was designed by Carvalho Bernau and developed by me.

The development of this project showcases perfectly the combined power of WordPress‘ block editor, with Mr.Dev.’s Framework, Mr.Dev’s Theme, Mr.Utils and some custom code.

Mr.Dev.’s Theme is a boilerplate theme, that allowed using all the features of the block editor on WooCommerce pages (including products and templates), while having the default colors managed from Mr.Dev.’s Framework.

Mr.Utils with Mr.Dev.’s Framework, added extra style options to the block editor including custom utility classes. That was very handy to define variables to all sizes (font-sizes, padding, margins, etc) and have them editable from one unique place in the backend if needed.

For all the custom code, I used the file manager of Mr.Dev.’s Framework to select where to load each CSS and JS, reducing unused code for each page. This was important for speed purposes. Some PHP custom code was also created. All files can be accessed trough the Framework and edited on the backend, using WordPress’ default plugin files editor.

The custom code was important to reach some specific needs of the design, here are some examples:

• Temporarily have the homepage redirecting to the most recent product/magazine-issue.
• Align footnotes with the text, according to the position of the note in the text (on non-mobile breakpoints).
• Automatically detect the color of the most recent product and apply it as accent color on the entire site (Products’ colors are added on Mr.Dev.’s Framework, by having the variable equal to the product slug).
• Allow different svg logos for each product (Uses safe SVG).
• Enable cache for almost all the pages, regardless of the cart item count. This was made possible by having custom javascript and cookies, to detect the number of items in cart. Also detects which products, to show a “View the cart” when a product is already in the cart.
• Detect when the scroll passes the header to change the color of the logo, menu, and “Buy” buttons from white to the accent color.
• Use the alt text of an image, to tell which should be the object-position/background-position for each breakpoint.
• Highlight the sub-menus according to the scroll on the page.
• Replace default tags taxonomy in favor of authors (multiple authors).
• Automatically create categories in Afazeres/Blog matching each WooCommerce product.

A portfolio website done for a designer, author, consultant and scholar.

The biggest challenge for this project was to combine the many needs:

• All projects appear on the page, inside accordions and tabs.
• Each project still needs its unique url that opens the correspondent accordion and tab.
• Keep it easy for the client to add and organize the content.

To answer to those needs, I started a widget that would later become the Mr.Dev.’s widget.

That widget would show all five categories’ titles and descriptions in an accordion.
And on each category description another widget, showing the posts in a tabs layout.

Website designed by Carvalho Bernau and developed by me, for the architecture atelier founded by Maria Cristina Campilho.

This website was made in WordPress, using plugins and tools developed by me, such as Mr.Dev.’s Framework. It uses classes and components from Mr.Utils front-end toolkit.

Thanks to that and because I manage this website’s server + domain, Atelier Campilho’s website score on Google Pagespeed Insights shows excellent results.

Website designed by Itemzero and developed by me for an architecture, engaging towards ecologic design.

In here you can see a good example of how powerful it can be to combine Mr.Utils with WordPress block editor. For the horizontal scroll/drag/swipe content, the trick was to add the class mr-swipecontent to the respective block’s advanced options.

And also for this website, Mr.Dev.’s Framework was used, with the offcanvas option active on mobile and placing reusable blocks (for logo, menu and lang switcher) on website sections (This was prior to the templates option on WP 5.8).

And because this website uses those plugins that I developed, some other plugins that I selected and because I manage this website’s server + domain, Ressano Garcia Arquitectos score on Google Pagespeed Insights shows excellent results.

Website designed by itemzero and developed by me for an architecture company.

The biggest challenge for this project was to show the list of projects on a horizontal scroll, with dragging and keyboard capabilities, while keeping compatibility with Internet Explorer.

When this website was made, that browser had enough usage.
Calculations for the final width of the horizontal container were made using jQuery.
The animated loading bar was an extra touch.

A discontinued platform that was developing personalized gifts, handcrafted in Portugal by the best craftsmen.

This website was designed by Itemzero and developed by me.

Some key features of this website were:

• Sticky galleries with zoom on mouseover. Showing all images on larger screens, becoming sliders that show two photos at a time on medium screens and sliders of one image at a time on smaller screens.
• Forms to request a quote with the option to send a file, with the logo for the personalized product.
• The forms have integration with Google Spreadsheets, so all data is organized and kept on a different database for extra security.
• Use of Mr.Dev.’s Widget, to display a header image on each category with a parallax effect. This is possible by using the options “Set Item image as first image found on category description” and “Only show categories of current url”. Know more

Storylabs was a children literature platform with sessions that primarily happened in museums and schools for a English-speaking audience.

The website was design by Itemzero and developed by me.

One of the key features of this website was the use of a plugin to manage events, distinguishing from upcoming and past events.