For the past few years I’ve been writing these, “year in review” things to summarize my full year.
This time around, I’m going to review an entire friggin’ decade. Why? Because a lot has happened in a near decade.
2010
In July of 2010 I left a company called Mannatech after working there for five years. I’d started in the call center, left in the Global Online Solutions department; the web division of marketing.
I’d learned HTML and CSS, and experienced managing content in a content management system.
I started at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas as a Business Analyst. My job was to gather technical requirements for a new CMS, called SDL Tridion.
So I learned about SDL Tridion starting with Tridion 2009. I thought it funny we were building an HTML5 site with a CMS that could only run in IE.
2011
My contract ended at Children’s in July of 2011. At Children’s we’d worked with this vendor called Tahzoo who helped us implement the website in Tridion.
My wife found a job in Colorado, so we moved there. I’d written quite a bit of CSS at Children’s, and I was keen on a developer job. But no one wanted a BA with a penchant for front-end.
Being in need of work, I left a message in my Skype status saying something like, “will work for teh moneyz,” or something.
Piti Itharat, my main contact from Tahzoo, messaged me to ask if I was serious. I told him I was and he said, “a’ight,” and I didn’t hear from him for a week.
Then I got a call from a guy named David Roe who worked at Tahzoo. And about a minute later Piti messaged me saying I might be getting a call. Piti was a bit late, as I’d already accepted the offer.
David asked me if I’d rather be a BA or a technical consultant. I said, “technical consultant. I want to wrote code.”
He knew that I only knew some HTML and CSS. But he took a chance. Which I appreciate.
My first client was using Tridion R 5.3. So it was a step back. I had to learn some PHP, JSP, VBScript, and Ruby on the fly. And a touch of JavaScript.
My first two Github repositories were created in December of 2011. I created a form feedback CSS boilerplate, and a “form protector” that used jQuery and the (then) new HTML5 LocalStorage API to save form input data. My form protector didn’t even work properly and Alex Klock had to show me how to fix a bug.
2012
I had I think 2-3 Tridion clients under my belt. Most running on 2009, but a few on 2011.
It was in 2012 that I wrote my first blog post about Tridion, which was about Tridion, HTML5, and jQuery.
My wife got the news she would be laid off and we made the (terrible) decision to move from the beautiful, mountainous, Colorado…
to Illinois.
Where there’s corn.
So at the end of 2012 we moved.
2013
I got nestled in with a particular Tridion client in Columbus, Ohio. I’d started writing some JavaScript (jQuery, really) under the tutelage of Alex Klock and Joe Shirley.
At that point I tried to create a table-generator because I was disappointed in the one that lived in Tridion. My first go at creating it used entirely jQuery. It was poorly architected and hard to follow, but by golly it worked ant it was feature rich.
Alex was also guiding me in how to write C# and .net. In fact I remember the shock when he told me that Razor Mediator for Tridion was actually just C#.
I’d thought it was a weird sort of JavaScript.
Though Razor Mediator 4 Tridion has since fallen by the wayside and been replaced by robust frameworks like DD4T and DXA, it was huge for me. Razor Mediator 4 Tridion made it possible for front-end developers, who maybe had only moderate exposure to templating and programming, to participate in “Tridion Development”.
Let that be a lesson for those reading this:
Make things that make it easier for people to make things.
It blurred the lines between front-end and back-end because I could take my own markup and create the template for it. That was huge because knowing how content would be templated guided me in how to write content.
Razor Mediator 4 Tridion put responsibility back on front-end developer’s shoulders for how to write content-manageable code.
Towards the end of 2013 we finished all of our adoption paperwork, and were ready — for the fourth time to adopt a child.
2014
After some frustrations with continued travel, I left Tahzoo for Content Bloom. Content Bloom was a Tridion shop full of A-Team professionals, and here I was. Barely a front-end guy.
They all could talk your ear off about TOM.net and Core Services.
I could tell you why not to use !important.
I felt way out of my league. Even their “front-end guy” could do stuff in JavaScript I couldn’t imagine.
After about 2 months, we parted ways.
It hurt, but it was good because it forced me to come to terms with where I fit in the world of web development and content management. I wasn’t a “full stack” developer or a “Tridion developer”. I was kind of a front-end guy who knew about content management.
2015
I enrolled in University of Phoenix for a Programming Certificate . I took a CS class, a Java class, a C++ class, and two web development classes. I earned the certificate in June.
In July I won the first ever SDL Hackathon by writing a jQuery plugin to manipulate videos out of Media Manager.
2016
I became attached to a client where I was writing a lot of just pure front-end. It was a large team with very distinct divisions of labor where front-end guys didn’t touch Tridion and back-end guys did.
It felt strange and frustrating to not be able to follow the content model from inception through code, but it was a great exercise in learning one domain really well.
I spent some time writing about Tridion Schema design, but a lot more time went to focusing on JavaScript and CSS at scale. That ranged from organizing JavaScript in web sites as functional units to making sure there are CSS fundamentals in place.
This was when I released the typography baseline, which is now an NPM package. The Typography baseline was a successful attempt to have a “starter” for the look and feel of a website. It’s been used in some form by two Fortune 500 companies (BCG and Starbucks’ internal sites). Additionally, this blog and my resume use it.
It’s the first thing I use after the reset/normalize for a web site or web app.
My wife and I had long since come to terms with not having a biological child of our own. Then to the surprise of both of us, she got pregnant.
And miscarried.
Miscarriage is difficult and awful. And it seems to happen more than anyone talks about. If you’ve miscarried — or your partner has — talk about it. Share your grief.
2017
I started drifting farther from HTML and CSS and more deeply in to JavaScript. I was reading more books about programming, and I was just plain programming more.
Additionally, I dived deeper into node.js. For the first time, I wrote about something that was just purely about node.js (headless screenshots)
I started to feel less like a front-end guy who knew some jQuery and more like a developer who knew JavaScript.
That project I’d been on — where I wasn’t really touching Tridion and was instead writing front-end — that was making me a much stronger front-end guy. I was keeping on the up and up for 2011, 2013, 2015, and Web 8. But it was at a distance.
2018
I was also put on a project that was well becoming a dumpster fire set in FUBAR-town in the middle of a shit storm. I was put on the project as the lead as we’d lost two architects who were previously trying to manage it.
I was designated the “back-end developer” for that project. I wrote C#, .net, and caught a few scary bugs in the node.js. I worked with the front-end developer to make the back-end better while leading some way more experienced back-end devs in how they could make everything else stable.
I’d learned how to set up and reinstall Tridion Microservices. I’d set up Fredhopper. Worked with Smart Target. Deployed .net applications. Set up continuous integration.
In the midst of this dumpster fire, I led a POC for a potential client. That again involved working with back-end, front-end, and writing some serious JavaScript.
I was promoted to Principal Software Architect as a result of all this. But that was overshadowed by something else…
My wife and I had grown tired of waiting for an infant that wasn’t there for us. So we decided to become foster parents; we were going to be parents to someone who was already there.
We weren’t even finished with our foster care training when a 2 year old who came with a “sassy pants 9 year old” were placed with us. They came to live with us on June 11.
In October, I left two children at home to got to Amsterdam to speak at the Tridion Developer Summit about node.js.
Not jQuery. Not HTML and CSS. Node.js. Dominic Cronin said afterwards,
It was really talk about JavaScript under the guise of Tridion.
2019
I accepted a job at EXLRT. I left Tahzoo as the architect on a project. My work for that client wasn’t even in code, it was in architectural diagrams.
My client engagement at EXLRT has been pure custom development; React, node.js, and .net.
I’ve been debugging node.js, writing microservices, unit tests, and deploying. I’ve even learned some powershell by accident.
I spoke at SDL Connect about mistakes. I went to Tridion Developer Summit as an attendee.
My wife and I adopted two girls.
2020 and Beyond
In 2010 I wasn’t even a developer. I was a content producer copying and pasting content from Word to a CMS. I was a guy struggling with with infertility.
In 2019 I’m a father who’s a Principal Solutions Consultant. I help people build software.
In 2020, I’m going to raise two girls and maybe talk about some code.
In the 2020’s, I’m gonna be a dad.