Etcetera

The projects featured elsewhere on this site are the ones with the best stories to tell. But they’re not the whole picture. Here’s a broader look at the work that fills the space around them.

Tools I built and shared

A recurring pattern in my career: I build something to solve a problem for myself or a client, and it turns out other people have the same problem.

Craft Link List started as a Google Doc where I shared Craft CMS links with a handful of developers. The feedback was positive enough that I turned it into a newsletter — published twice a month to over 2,000 subscribers, with sponsorship for its entire five-year run. When I was ready to move on, the Craft CMS team adopted it as their official newsletter. Not a bad outcome for a shared Google Doc.

Pic Puller began as a Burger King project — a server-side app that pulled their Instagram feed into a custom Tumblr theme I’d built. The project launched, the head chef who was the face of it left the company two weeks later, and the site went offline. I took the bones of that project and re-engineered it into a commercial Craft CMS plugin. Pic Puller was used on hundreds of sites, and I sold it for eight years before retiring it. The code still lives in its GitHub archive.

Build a Banner was born from repetition. My business partner Jon Magner and I made thousands of animated banner ads over the years at JMX2, and the setup for each one was tedious. Build a Banner is a Yeoman workflow that generates a starter project — asks for the project name, banner size, and ad platform, spins up a local server, and packages the finished banners for delivery. I published it on NPM and Docker Hub.

Progressive Share Button is a web component that wraps the Web Share API and displays device-appropriate share icons for iOS, Android, and Windows. If the API isn’t supported, it removes itself from the page. A share button really should be a native part of HTML — it isn’t, so I built one and put it on NPM.

Procore — Brand Standards Site

I built the brand guideline site for Procore, working closely with their design and creative team to document their standards with precision. The site was built using a custom static site generator I created, optimized for fast rendering with critical CSS per page. A brand guide that doesn’t follow its own guidelines isn’t much of a guide — this one did.

Before all of this

Before I was a developer, I was an art director. I spent years at agencies — Ammirati & Puris, DDB, Bozell, Dentsu, and others — making ads for brands like Compaq, Nikon, and Degree. It was a good career, and it gave me a foundation in visual thinking, storytelling, and working with clients that I still use every day.

My last big advertising project before making the jump to tech was for Compaq Computers. My writing partner Liz Rosenthal and I were the creative team that sold a series of TV spots featuring Sting as the spokesperson. The professional in me would like to tell you the primary benefit I gained from the experience was a fuller understanding of the branding process. The fanboy in me can confirm the primary benefit was going on tour with Sting for three weeks.