So once again I’m moving jobs after being offered a role that I’ve been looking for since leaving Mozilla and having my 2013 summer holiday; I’m going to be the Head of Front-End Development at Possible Worldwide. After nearly 10 years of being 100% hands on I’m looking forward to start taking a couple of steps back to be able to think about how front end development can best integrate and contribute to a company and clients on going development as well as building out my team of devs in London and remote offices.
tl;dr
- Building a responsive website onto of an existing (and profitable) desktop website has been an experience (both good and bad)
- Am really looking forward to put into practice some ideas I’ve had over the years aimed to making my dev team feel great and do great work
- I’m looking to recruit a lead dev to join me in the Front-End team, if you would like this to be you get in touch!
Memories of hotels.com
I’ve not done as much as I would have liked – but it’s certainly getting there slowly but surely; slowly being the main word. I would have liked to have taken a few more risks than I’ve been able to but the reality is that I’ve been working on a site whose #1 objective is be increase revenue into the business. Hopefully once all responsive work is complete that which I have done will be fully realised. I’ve also learnt a ton of stuff about implementing responsive development practices, responsive browsers bugs and mobile device quirks; oh the quirks!
Along with that I’ve also had the pleasure to work with some super fun people, enjoy a few perks of the travel industry (I’m going to miss the hotel discounts) and expanded my European horizons having enjoyed trips to Budapest AND Lisbon. I hope that I’ve left a good impression on everyone I’ve work with there.
Work
After helping to get hotels.com UIE developers to take on a work-flow process similar to those I used while working remotely for Mozilla (git, pull requests, code reviews and continual CI builds) I’m excited to see if I’m able to get a similar working process set up in the agency world. I think it’s a good way for front-end teams to show the progress on their work as well as ensuring that design and UX teams creations are being implemented correctly. Equally it gives individuals that might be working as the single front-end dev on a project the ability to have their work quality validated by their peers and hopefully feel less isolated.
I’ll be looking to find the ‘best’ dev stack to allow this rapid development process – something that means that front-end developers can work in isolation of a back-end up yet still utilise the things that it does provide (actual data, API end points, database connections) without needing to rely on a back-end team to make it for us yet be ready to integrate into the real system when all is prepared.
People
Being a front-end developer is an epic job and one that people should be super happy to be in but reasons of burn out, depression and lack of personal development are all issues that can make it feel anything but – personally I’ve suffered with all of these; my personal goal is to have all my devs not have to go through this and feel like the winners that they are. I’ve got plenty of ideas on how I’ll be doing this, will let you know of the ones that work (and those that don’t so you don’t have to worry about them).
Come join me
Possible have some big plans for 2015 – and I’m by no means the only new face coming into the business. We’re looking to grow the team across all disciplines and the same goes true for front end who are looking for a lead developer to come join the team.
Like the idea of working with me to make cool stuff, work open and feel great about doing it? Get in touch with me – rossbruniges at gmail.com and I’m happy to do some introductions.
