BCWEEKES

Blog

  • Some thoughts on Creating Expertise

    Expertise is an interesting topic. One might visit my website and see that I frequently reference creating expertise, at the same time they find a variety of topics spoken about on this site. At one point, I was convinced if I wanted to become an expert I needed to focus on just one subject professionally. I have considered this for a long time and now feel differently about creating expertise.

    Let’s look at Thomas Jefferson as a case study on expertise. Jefferson could be considered one of the most accomplished men in public life as well as the most versatile, jack of all trade if you will. The proverbial, “jack of all trades, master of none.” Yet Jefferson was considered an expert in many areas: architecture, civil engineering, geography, mathematics, ethnology, anthropology, mechanics, the sciences, and politics.

    Thomas Edison makes another excellent case study on expertise. Edison developed a reputation as a skilled and creative inventor, having contributed innovations to printing telegraphs, facsimile telegraphs, automatic relays, stock tickers, and many other devices. In addition to being an innovator, his knowledge was deep in chemistry and business. His influence and innovative mind has influenced modern life for nearly a century after his death.

    I hope that as people strive to become experts they will look at many aspects of their life and work to learn both broadly and deeply for in this they will find relationships and correlations with an opportunity for break throughs and profound knowledge.

  • Advanced excel, SQL, & tableau course


    Pivot tables, pivot charts, slicers, goal seek and solver
    Statistics: descriptive statistics, and simple linear regression.

  • Website design and development YouKnowStyrene

    Completed the design and development of YouKnowStyrene.org.

  • The Frankenstein Computer Science Degree

    Having already gone so far in learning and working in the computer programming world, it just did not make sense to start over and go get a degree from a university—nor did I really have the time to take off to go and do so. There is so much I have learned hands on coding on my own, but definitely there are skills I felt I was lacking.

    After a bit of research I decided to cobble together a Frankenstein Computer Science Degree. The interesting part is this actually allows me to take a number of courses from some pretty great universities and organizations.

    The Curriculum

    This curriculum is meant to grow as I learn more about what I don’t know. Therefore, not all courses here have been completed (some still to start) and most at varying levels of completion.

    Thank you to this post for some additional guidance on courses.

  • Design and development Styrene website

    Recently completed the styrene.org website redesign and development.

  • Design and development LDSPMA website

    While serving on the LDSPMA board of directors I have assisted as Marketing and Technology Director.

    Initially I inherited an older website that had been built a few years previous. In the summer of 2019 the website crashed just months before our main conference for the year. I quickly developed a new website for LDSPMA.org, in order to keep things going in time for the conference. Since then the websites has evolved and been updated as an ongoing project.

  • PEDRA Research website

    PeDRA was formed in 2012 by leaders of the Society for Pediatric Dermatology (SPD) with the goal of bringing together pediatric dermatologists to collaborate on research that could not be accomplished alone or without coordination.  In this way, PeDRA is generating meaningful data to support health care decisions and improve the lives of patients and their families, while building a community of linked and research-ready clinician scientists in the field of pediatric dermatology.

    PeDRA is a collaborative research network, providing a platform from which pediatric dermatologists organize studies and collaborate, while also supporting individuals embarking on early stage research that may or may not benefit from collaboration in future. Pooling resources and linking investigators together multiplies the power of each individual clinician scientist many-fold. With more than 300 clinician researchers representing more than 145 institutions, PeDRA is accelerating research and bringing new treatment opportunities for children.

    PeDRA is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works in close collaboration with, and serves as the research arm of, the Society for Pediatric Dermatology (SPD).

    Over the years, Hales Creative has done a number of projects for PEDRA Research including initial brand design and website. As PREDA has grown and evolved over the years, PEDRAResearch.org website needed an update and needed new features offered, but in order to accomplish that they needed a brand refresh first. After the rebrand, I designed (along with our Hales team) the PEDRAResearch.com website.

    With a growing need to create outreach opportunities to patients as well as improve collaboration of researchers and physicians, the website needed ways to better communicate and interact with users. These requirements made this the most extensive web build to date with many development projects within the main website project. This project required my first real build-out of a membership platform website. I also integrated a forum for member communication and collaboration. The use of forms on this site is very extensive providing an interactive, smart form as part of the membership application process. The client requested a membership dashboard where members could view their online information and review it periodically. The dashboard also regulates member only information and pages.

  • Hales Creative website

    In my work with Hales Creative I was tasked with the design (influenced by other team members) and development of HalesCreative.com. Again, this is an earlier project—I think it was done in 2016 or 2017. We are looking at minor updates to the design and a major update to the backend.