Bruton Stroube Studios

I've worked with Bruton Stroube Studios on various projects over the past 10 years. Much of their design was done by another company years ago, and while I've done design work across their website, most of my work has consisted of development work.

More recently, their server was repeatedly slowing down to a halt, both on their public-facing website and inside their content management system, Craft CMS. The asset library had grown to over 40,000 images and videos, and was used to build portfolios, case studies and presentations for potential clients. Their large source images were being resized by their app server and were causing the server to crash repeatedly.

I migrated their codebase into GitHub, moved their Craft CMS installation to Digital Ocean with server provisioning and deployments done through Laravel Forge, re-setup their server infrastructure to better service their large amount of assets by employing AWS to offload asset storage, and resize and cache their huge library of assets on-the-fly using a combination of S3, CloudFront and Lambda functions.

When building client presentations, they also had a broken PDF generator that was supposed to allow web presentations to be downloaded as PDFs. I redesigned the PDF layouts and employed headless Chrome running on the server to generate PDFs whenever a presentation is saved, which are then uploaded to S3 and served via CloudFront.

Bruton Stroube also wanted an internal weekly digest email that gathers their most recent uploads, portfolios, case studies and presentations and sends it to the whole company every Sunday to keep everyone up to date on new work. This involved creating a plugin for Craft CMS.

Lately, we have explored using AWS Rekognition and Stable Diffusion to implement AI tagging of their entire asset library for a better user experience when it comes to searching for photos when building client presentations.