Estevão – WordPress, PHP, Laravel

A web development project supporting two corporate clients with content-driven digital platforms. The work involved maintaining and enhancing WordPress and Laravel-based systems, as well as highly customized WordPress themes and plugins tailored to the clients’ specific business and content management needs.

• Helped rebuild the website for a major Manhattan-based policy institute by building a fully custom WordPress theme powered by two separate Laravel backends leveraging AWS services;
• Maintained and evolved an MIT-affiliated management review, including performance optimization, new editorial features, and platform development;
• Brought PDF exports of magazine articles to full WCAG-AA compliance in under 2 months, meeting ADA requirements and unblocking sales across archived articles;
• Extended and customized a Laravel/FileMaker content distribution system, enabling licensed redistribution of magazine articles to external partners;
• Served as technical point of contact for non-technical stakeholders by scoping work, estimating level of effort, and evaluating potential vendors against technical requirements.

A custom WordPress theme was developed collaboratively and used for a personal blog for several years. The project includes a traditional WordPress theme architecture rather than a block-based approach, along with an experimental React-based branch created as an early exploration of React development.

• Built an experimental React-based version of the WordPress theme as an early hands-on React project;
• Applied React concepts in a practical project environment to strengthen frontend development skills;
• Explored component-based development and React application structure through hands-on implementation;
• Iteratively improved the project while gaining practical experience with React development;
• Learned and evaluated new React concepts through direct implementation rather than relying solely on theoretical or passive learning methods.

A PHP-based project demonstrating practical implementations of commonly used software design patterns. The project used sample data representing different types of animals and applied various design patterns to process, structure, and manipulate the data, providing hands-on examples of pattern-based software design.

• Implemented practical examples of commonly used PHP design patterns;
• Applied different design patterns to structure and process sample data representing multiple entities;
• Evaluated different patterns to understand their appropriate use cases and trade-offs;
• Refactored and structured code to demonstrate pattern-specific approaches to common software design problems;
• Strengthened practical understanding of when and why to apply specific design patterns in PHP applications.

A scalable WordPress theme designed for a multi-site network of more than 100 websites. The project focused on ensuring reliability, scalability, maintainability, and a client-agnostic architecture that could support diverse websites and use cases without being tied to a specific client.

• Built and shipped the company's main product, a WordPress theme used in over 100 websites, together with the development team;
• Improved real-world site performance, including backend response times by up to 75% in some cases;
• Served in a leadership role by mentoring junior developers and maintaining and updating documentation for new collaborators;
• Built and delivered, together with the team, an entirely customized system for event registrations in under 1 month.