Journal

Sep 8 , 2011

Jina Bolton is a GitHubber

The official announcement. :)

Sep 2 , 2011

Team Virb: Virb: A Simpler CMS

This is the CMS I use and love. Great post about why.

virb:

As web designers and developers we take great pride in finding and using the right tool for the job. When it comes to content management systems, the right tool for us is one that makes site management simple, but with the flexibility and power we need to build clients a beautiful, functional…

(Source: virb)

Aug 24 , 2011

My last day at Engine Yard

Today is my last day at Engine Yard. It’s a cliché to say, but this definitely a bittersweet day.

I’ve been working here for almost a year. It’s a short time, I know, but it was still long enough for me to feel sad about leaving. I love the people I’ve worked with here. My teammates are some of the most incredibly smart Ruby developers I know (except Andrew and Jessica, who do design and front-end — but they’re very talented, too). Everyone on my team, past and present, are all hilarious, fun, awesome at hacky sack, and now that I’ve gotten to know them, I’d call them great friends.

Engine Yard is a fantastic company and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them. They’re super passionate about the open source Ruby community, and go out of their way to sponsor events, offer educational workshops and hack days, and of course they’re known for throwing a lot of money at opportunities to get developers really, really drunk.

One of the best things about my time here is that I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about the practices outside of the standard front-end development workflow I’m used to. I’d used Git before (in the pull-commit-push sense); now I know how to create my own branches, rebase, and merge. I even staged my own EY cloud that I could prototype with before I would deploy things to production. This was all scary stuff to learn at first as a designer, but now I feel like I’m a stronger designer and front-end developer going forward. I have so much to thank Engine Yard for.

So why am I leaving? Well, firstly, I wasn’t even looking to leave at all. I was pretty darn happy at Engine Yard and turning down recruiters left and right — and I would highly recommend anyone to go work here. But an opportunity came up, and well, it was just too good of an opportunity to turn down.

Because I feel like being a tease, I’ll wait until they announce my hiring (in their typical fashion) before I announce it on my own (though a few people already know). I will say I’m super excited and I look forward to the work I’ll be doing with them and the rad, talented people I’ll be working with. Look for a blog post on that soon…

In the meantime, Engine Yard is hiring. They have great compensation and benefits, lots of high-quality Scotch whisky, and a super rad rooftop penthouse in their San Francisco location. They also recently opened a sweet Portland office, too. So if you play a mean game of hacky sack (or would like to learn how to), and if you are a good programmer (even if in another language besides Ruby), send your test-driven code samples, your GitHub URL, links to any projects you’ve done (especially open source projects) to the VP of Engineering, Tammer Saleh (tsaleh@engineyard.com).

May 16 , 2011

Anthony Garand: Thoughts on ValioCon 2011

Great write up of ValioCon 2011.

garand:

Lets face it, we all spend a majority of our time on the web. Wether it be interacting with each other on twitter, checking out each others work on dribbble, or chatting back and forth on Skype. While that is essential to building relationships with everyone in the industry, its not enough.

…

Apr 22 , 2011

Team Virb: New Feature: Multiple Sites

Hooray!!!

virb:

We’re happy to announce Multiple Sites with a single login. If you already have an existing website with Virb you will notice the new Sites link atop of your Build area where you can now create new sites on a single account and manage them all in one place.



When you have more than one…

(Source: virb)

Apr 3 , 2011

My strange dream; the planet and the suns

Last night I dreamed I was on a strange, beautiful planet with vivid colorful skies. There were two suns that seemed to be on completely different orbits (here it seemed the suns moved in revolution around the planet, instead of the planet revolving around them).

Then in my dream, the planet and suns became personified; both suns were tall, dark-haired men in armor. They were both in love with the planet, a tall blonde with piercing blue eyes; she was a beautiful lady in a flowing white gown.

The two suns were appointed to be by her side, for here she was a queen and the stars, suns, and moon were her court. She was ecstatic to receive the two handsome suns because they were both very smart, very handsome, and very strong. She loved them both equally, but she was not in love with either of them. She simply enjoyed having both suns around as close friends.

The oldest sun was happy to serve her, bringing the day and night on schedule and always had a pleasant attitude. He would be fine doing whatever she needed, even if the love for her was not returned. However, his brother, the youngest sun, was angry. Despite her lack of romantic feelings for either of them, he grew more and more jealous of his brother, and decided to begin a new revolution path out of spite; he began to revolve around the planet much faster and wider in an attempt to capture more attention. This caused the days and nights to become sporadic and caused massive confusion to the people of the planet. It eventually threw both of the suns’ revolutions out of whack eventually leading toward a collision & the lady planet was left without either sun.

The explosion from the collision of both suns caused rays of fire to rain down upon the planet, resulting in her having much injury and devastation. As she continued to cry, her tears helped put out the fire rain which eventually stopped, and the moon now had no more light to reflect down onto the planet. He was full of grief for the loss of his two great suns, and because he could no longer serve his purpose without their light. The planet was distraught because she had lost her two best friends.

The dream then changed back to me being with the remaining people of the planet who had survived the fire rain; we were all devastated, looking up at the sky. There was a lightless moon, and the stars were not close enough to cast any light. People had to rely on constant fire to see and stay warm. Soon, the planet was not strong enough to sustain them. She reached out to the moon in solace, and he came to her side, causing another collision and then everything was gone.

Mar 25 , 2011

The Sushi Concierge: Sushi Can Survive, and Improve

sushiconcierge:

By Trevor Corson

With the ongoing tragedy in Japan, people have been asking me if sushi is safe to eat, and indeed, whether the future of sushi as a cuisine might be in jeopardy.

Sushi originated as a snack of small seasonal fish and shellfish from local Japanese waters, but now, for…

Jan 20 , 2011

Engine Yard: Front-end Maintainability with Sass and Style Guides

Check out my recent post at the Engine Yard blog regarding how the user experience team is working with Sass and Style guides. If you’re doing something similar, I would love to know your thoughts on it. (It’d be great if you commented there instead of here so that I have one central place to look for feedback).

Oct 21 , 2010

Engine Yard: The Pixel Brigade Has Arrived

Engine Yard’s blog post announcing Andrew’s & my new roles there as user experience designers. :)

Oct 2 , 2010

On My Way to Amsterdam

I’m blogging from a plane! :)

I’m excited because I’m on my way to Amsterdam for the Fronteers 2010 conference where I’ll be speaking on CSS Workflow. There’s an amazing line-up:

Crazy awesome. I’m also looking forward to meeting up with one of my best friends, Faruk. It’s going to be a great week. For those going, see you there!

Sep 24 , 2010

Some Quick Updates

Today I wrapped up my first week at Engine Yard. It was a really good week, and I can already tell I’m working with some really sharp guys. I have to get used to working in an office around other people again (as I worked from home for a while for my last gig). My team is really cool and I look forward to working more with them. I’ll be blogging over at the Engine Yard blog here and there, so keep an eye out there for updates. I’ll also post a link to the posts here when that happens as well.

I’ll be attending my first RubyConf with my team in New Orleans this November. I’m curious how that will turn out for me, as I’m not a Ruby developer by any means. I do think it’ll give me some insight that will be helpful for my work. (If you’re female and attending and need to share a hotel room, contact me!)

Outside of work, I’ve been pretty busy working steadily on my thesis. Keep an eye out on my Dribbbles over the next few months for some sneak peaks at what I’m working on. I’ll reveal more details a little later as things develop.

Very soon I’ll be heading over to Amsterdam. If you’ll be in or around Amsterdam during the week of October 7th & 8th, you should definitely come to the Fronteers 2010 conference where I’ll be speaking on CSS Workflow. There are a lot of really great speakers in the line-up that I’m looking forward to hearing.

That’s all for now. I’m still planning on getting my own design up and running on this site fairly soon. I still have an archive up of the old site for those who miss it. :)

Sep 17 , 2010

Engine Yard

Today is my last day at Crush + Lovely. As mentioned before, this is a bittersweet transition for me. It’s sad to leave because I really love those guys and would highly recommend them to anyone who needs web site and/or application design and development (as well as mobile design or even video/film). However, I am also very excited about where I’m headed and what I’ll be doing.

Starting this Monday, I will be a train designer. Okay, not really. But I will be Engine Yard’s new User Experience designer, where I will be working on rejuvenating the cloud dashboard. Engine Yard, located in San Francisco, is a cloud-based hosting platform for Ruby on Rails applications.

I’m looking forward to designing through a user-centered and tested, iterative approach for the product as well as working with a really talented group of people. I think it will be a challenging but fun change of pace for me, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that experience with you guys (as I plan to blog more about the work I’m doing when and where I’m able to).

So, to those of you who use Engine Yard, I want to hear from you. Please, feel free to share your thoughts about the product (particularly the dashboard) with me here in the comments or contact me and share your insight with me. I’m listening.

Sep 10 , 2010

Trips, Awards, Site Changes, & Me

This year has already been a pretty eventful year for me. I just got back from a trip to Norway, where I spoke in Oslo at Frontend 2010. I had a really great time and met a lot of great people. Norway is a very beautiful place.

In the above photo: Me, doing my part to help protect Norway.

Some more trips I have coming up: Amsterdam (for Fronteers Conference), Las Vegas (for Web Design World), and Nashville (for Think Tank Nashville). Nashville is my hometown, so it will be interesting to go there for business purposes!

At graduate school, I recently passed my midpoint and am now working extensively on my thesis. I will reveal more information about that soon. I’m currently taking a User Experience class (in which we begin the research and prototype stage of our thesis projects), as well as a class on Interactive Information Graphics. Both classes sound fun to me!

I’ve moved to a new place again, which was bittersweet for me. I loved the previous modern loft I had but the rent was raised too high for my budget. Now, however, I live in an awesome place near Dolores Park, and I have a roommate and a lot more space now.

Some other interesting bits of news:

  • I was apparently nominated for “web personality of the year” (seriously?), so feel free to vote for me: .net Magazine Awards
  • My side project, Art in My Coffee, has grown quite a bit. It was nominated for a Web Visionary Award (2010) and it actually won (though I think by default). That’s okay. It was also featured on the homepage of Altoids.com which is pretty amazing. Meagan and I have a lot of plans for this site in the coming months.
  • I have comments on my site again!
  • I moved my site to Tumblr. (You probably noticed that). My site was getting attacked with malware issues frequently, and I needed to do something about it fast. So my first thought was to move it to Virb, and use Tumblr for the blogging portion (since Virb has Tumblr integration). However, I’m waiting for the upcoming custom HTML features to launch to do that, so until then, it’ll just be on Tumblr. This theme is temporary and will be replaced with my own design soon. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll try to shoehorn in my grid design I had previously or create something new all together. We’ll see.
  • Unfortunately, since I’m not very savvy about redirecting feeds and such, you might have to update your RSS readers (if you actually do subscribe to my site). If you just used the Feedburner URL, you’re good to go. But if you used the /feed URL, please change it to http://sushiandrobots.com/rss

And now for the big news. I’m very, very sad to say that I am leaving Crush + Lovely. It’s been an amazing time and I’ve worked with some truly talented and awesome people. I’ve worked on some really beautiful projects with them, and am looking forward to some more projects I know about that will release in the future. All the employees, contractors, interns, clients, and vendors (past and present) that I’ve worked with through Crush + Lovely have been great. I can’t wait to see what is next for them. My last day will be next Friday, September 17th.

So what’s next? A new opportunity has come my way which I’m very excited about and will tell you about in my next post.

May 20 , 2010

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Wow, it’s been quiet around here. I am wrapping up my semester at AAU this week. It’s been a really intense semester, and I’m looking forward to the break.

I have some cool conferences lined up this year that I thought I’d mention:

Needless to say, I’m stoked about the events. Also, I’m really late on posting my new featured artist, but look for that soon!

Mar 1 , 2010

Featured Artist: Jason Walton

My fifth featured artist is Jason Walton. Jason Walton is an illustrator living in Portland, Oregon. He draws things so you don’t have to.

The following is my interview with Jason.

What are five words you would use to describe your style?

Versatile. Graphic. Humorous. Cartoon. Bold.

What, or who are your influences for your illustration style?

Vintage cartoons (advertising characters, Looney Tunes, Space Ghost), vintage posters (Olympic/Skiing/WPA), roller derby uniforms from the 70s, my five-year-old son, logo design, Portland creatives, New Yorker cartoons, the posters of Modern Dog Design, Egon Schiele, Joe Ciardello.

What are your thoughts on the merging of web design and illustration?

To me, it’s a beautiful thing. Since the dawn of websites, I have been dreaming of the possibility of keeping my work in digital form. Not that I don’t love printed or handmade things, which I do; it’s just that from an efficiency/ecology perspective, I love this new realm.

Do you have any insight you’d like to share about your process of creating the artwork you did for Sushi & Robots?

For these robots, I was inspired by the unself-conscious spontaneity of my 5 yo son’s drawings. Something that helps is the fact that I create with a mouse, without sketches, which gives some randomness to the lines that is not necessarily my default inclination. Historically my work has been very tight and controlled, but have recently undergone a creative rejuvenation — partly because of my son and partly from looking at the book Modern Dog: 20 Years of Poster Art.

If you like sushi, what’s your favorite?

Being born and raised in South Dakota, I am a late comer to it, but I do love Sushi. Any sushi with shellfish is tops for me. I also love the pickled ginger that comes with it, which I now suddenly have a craving for.

If you owned an army of robots, would they be good or evil?

Robot Army? My robot army would be good… good at robbing banksand bringing me the money.

Jason is currently working on an illustration of a jet-pack pilot for The Faster Times that they will be using on promotional products for subscribers. He loves his job.

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