20 Questions With Our Web Developer

R: Can you explain your creative process?

J: It’s not necessarily how I create because I don’t have to really come up with creative ideas. When building a website, I just follow an XD file. 

Where it (creativity) comes in for me, is when we’re trying to create motion with code. It’s very flexible and you can do a lot with it, but it is also a pain.

It’s a matter of breaking down a whole website piece by piece. Like, “I want XYZ to happen when I do this event.” Basically, I’m looking at something on a website and I want it to do something else. It’s not a simple ‘Process 1’ to ‘Process 2.’ It’s usually Process 1: Sub Process 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to get to Process 2. 

So mapping that out and seeing the progression of an event that causes animation or movement in a website is definitely the most rewarding process creatively for me.

R: What’s the coolest code/website you’ve ever seen?

J: The coolest code I’ve ever seen a responsive website built for the artist Ja Rule. Wait, not Ja Rule. Sorry, he sucks.

R: His Fyre Festival website must’ve been pretty good. 

J: Jai Paul. That’s who I meant. It was almost like the website was a totally different environment that you were exploring; not just a surface-level website. It was literally moving around, going deeper physically into the website, and seeing different things. 

The coolest piece I’ve worked on: I  built a 3D imaging software that you can see live updates of COVID cases, deaths, and totals around the world. And that’s yeah, that was probably my biggest and coolest project. COVID-19 tracker.

R: Um, what’s one, you wish you knew about web development that you weren’t taught in school?

J: I don’t know if it’s necessarily web development. I feel like everything I do is pretty accurate from what I learned in school. But I would say that what I have learned here is how to communicate effectively my needs, especially in an environment like this, being the only one who knows code, along with Kristina. I’ve learned how to communicate my needs to the greater group in a way that’s effective and makes my life easier.

R: What do you think is the easiest SEO tip that you still don’t see people doing?

J: There’s two. I feel like more often than not, people are not following basic hierarchy in their sites are using header one, header two, header three, and that’s going to knock you in SEO.

And they’re also not adding image attributes. It’s the alternative text for a picture in case it didn’t show up. That’s another very easy one to get knocked for.

Joe & The No Good Very Bad Day When The Internet Broke

R: So, my first day at Brand Iron the internet broke, and not in a good way. Can you describe that day for the people at home?

J: Well, I came into the office and Michael was like, “Hey, we need to be making sure that we update the hosting server quite frequently because this website’s down.” 

I think it was one of our healthcare websites. Then within about 10 minutes, like 5 or 6 other clients called to say that their websites were down too. I think we ended up with 20 websites in total.

We realized that our websites weren’t fully migrated from our old hosting servers to our new ones. Between the previous developer and myself, there was a two-month period when this issue started. During that gap, nobody noticed because there was a backend misconfiguration so clients weren’t getting emails. 

We ended up having to go in and update all the records and rework about six months’ worth of work for probably about 10 of those websites.

That’s many, many, many hours. Yeah, that was quite a trying time.

R: That was a trying time. I didn’t even realize how difficult it was. Props to you. 

Let’s switch it up. 

Have you ever seen your job portrayed in a show and or movie in a way that feels accurate to you?

J: I’ve seen a little bit of Silicon Valley. They do a lot more than I do but it’s accurate.