My job is one part interaction design and two parts user interface development. You could just as easily say that I’m obsessed with building intuitive, pragmatic, and surprising web experiences that are as beautiful as they are functional. Maybe I could do that for you, too.
Yammer is an enterprise social network, providing a secure way for employees to communicate, collaborate, and share information. In September 2008 they launched at the TechCrunch 50 Conference, winning the grand prize. Today they're used at over 100,000 companies with networks at over 80% of the fortune 500.
They have a tremendous core of engineers and business people, they generate real money, they know how to treat their employees, and they are hiring! (Wil sent you.)
NodeConf SummerCamp is an unconference for javascript geeks in the hills of Northern California. I quickly ran with the creative freedom this project provided me, whipping out my pen tablet and painting trees, a cave, and a wooden summer camp sign! The end product is a whimsical little one page website to promote the fun weekend retreat.
ZangZing is a photo sharing start-up based in the Presidio area of San Francisco which I worked on while it was still pre-launch. I spearheaded the front-end development of their alpha launch. It’s a challenging and UI-heavy application which made it fun.
Wikia empowers more than 75,000 communities like Wookieepedia, WoW Wiki, and Lostpedia. They’re the largest user-generated media company and a top 100 web property. It can be a fun challenge because they're an extremely high-volume site which allows custom CSS/Javascript modifications by each wiki!
I’m pretty excited about the work I've done with them. You can see it live in their hub pages (UI engineering) and the popular user achievements release (product consulting and UI engineering)!
St.eeze is my personal front-end boilerplate updated for HTML5 and CSS3. Lots of cool extras, demos, and documentation to come some day, lulz.
Powder Envy is a project that I’ve had in my back pocket for a long time. One day the idea for the gondola visualization just hit me out of the blue. I sketched it up in my moleskine and emailed it to my pal, Tom. After that things started moving quickly. I suddenly found myself with this very striking center-piece, and that made everything that much more fun to make!
The primary design goals were to be simple, useful, and beautiful. The site is geared to get skiers and riders the info they care about as easily as possible, while giving the cubicle jockeys something to look at while we count the hours until our next powder day! The top goals going forward include OAUTH support, improving the snow data quality, adding mobile enhancements, making it easier to access reports, weather data, expansion to additional apis (like flickr, myspace, facebook), and more.
When Zivity and Top Fans (now Bubble Fusion Labs) split up I stayed at Zivity with the goal of making it a profitable website. I was pretty excited for the opportunity to flex my design and product concept muscles after a year and a half working primarily as a Senior UI Engineer.
I immediately started work on a new home page design intended to overcome longstanding problems converting new users while signaling to the ones we had that there was more to come. After a great response, the new design was spread to the rest of the site and Zivity got a new Showcase to direct people to the editors’ favorite content. We added credit card processing, tagging, prizes, fixed endless bugs, and over the course of 7 months we doubled our 18 month-old subscriber base!
Top Fans was fun because it was a chance for us to work on a brand new application and develop it right from the ground up. It was by far the best development team that Zivity had during the two years I worked there. In no time at all the site was conceptualized, developed, designed, and launched. Over the next few months we made countless improvements and fun-to-develop features like a posterous-style handler of video, audio, and images from blackberries, iphones, etc.
During this time I also contributed to a small open source autocomplete plugin for jQuery to give it JSON support, extended it to work as a search input (it was a glorified drop-down menu to begin with), and cleaned it up. I chose it because it was still light weight, most plugins are over-stuffed with features, and felt like I could extend it the rest of the way to get it production-ready.
Working for Zivity was a charmed life for many reasons. Zivity was my first Rails development job and my first "mainstream" (Silicon Valley VC funded) start-up. My first day at Zivity Forbes was in the office. A couple days after Zivity was prominent at “the Crunchies,” two months later we were funded. And, all the while, I got to work with some really great people making some really cool stuff.
Former Zivity employees work at companies like Change.org, Yammer, and Twitter. They have founded brick and mortar companies like Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper and The Secret Wine Shop.
I was hired January of 2008 as a Web Developer. In July of 2008 I was promoted to Sr. UI Engineer. In April of 2009 Zivity became Top Fans, of which I was a SR UI Engineer until the companies split in July. At that time I became the UI Architect and Community Advocate of Zivity.