This site is built using Hugo, a blazing-fast static site generator based on the Go programming language. I’ve put together a writing and publishing workflow that can be used across devices, including mobile, that I’m really happy with. It’s not for everyone, but if you favor Markdown as I do, and want to have all your content in a single managed place, it could be a good solution for you. This post outlines how I went about setting it all up.
As Technical Director, Lead Programmer and Project Manager on the Powderbird website redesign with Owen Jones & Partners, I had an opportunity to harness a powerful group of technologies to tell this adventure ski tour company’s story with immersive photography, design and copy. I built a flexible CMS to allow for easy management of front-end design, assets and copy, as well as a back-end that handles ski tour reservations and user management.
When Jack Phillips and Andrew Lightman met with me at Owen Jones to kick off development of the new IIA website, I knew immediately that their level of engagement was going to have a hugely positive influence on the project. When stakeholders participate in discovery and stay engaged throughout a project, from requirements-gathering through development and testing, it has a much greater chance of being successful than those lacking that kind of engagement.
This internal project with Owen Jones & Partners was one of the more fun projects I had the opportunity to work on with Adobe. I was able to apply a test-driven development approach to building an experience that was easy, fast and intuitive to use. The goal was to build a community platform where students could post videos, photos and written content, and be rated by program managers, who could communicate back through a custom messaging system.
This native iOS app was written in Objective-C. A significant portion of the work focused on fine tuning the movement of various text and graphical elements across multiple pages. The project was particularly well suited for the screen-by-screen approach to becoming “unstuck.”
Looking back at the Struck website redesign I worked on in 2012, it’s interesting to compare favorably the refinements of today’s site over the original. Much of the design has been cleaned up and, I think, improved. However, the core layout and lazy-loading functionality remains very much intact today, which feels like a testament to the underlying technology stack and implementation I chose as Technical Director. In addition to managing the project, I was responsible for the front-end development work on the site, and helping guide the Rails development.