Networks

Introduction

By day, I'm the director of design technology at WSJ.com, in the afternoon I teach at Cooper Union, educating designers on appreciating the web as a medium, and in the evening work on crazy projects with my brother under the name apartm.net.

What languages/frameworks do you use (Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc.)?

PHP, html, css, javascript, mysql.

What topics might you be interested in?

Continuous integration strategies, design workflows, design-led product development, scaling strategies for the design process, modular front-end html discussions, when to stray from best practices and standards for the sake of scale.

Do you have any specific areas of expertise? Would you be willing to share it with the group?

I spoke last year at SXSW, in a talk titled "Do tablets dream of electric news?" with the then head of UX for mobile apps at NYT, about our organizations' approach to tablet news design. This year I've given a lecture at General Assembly entitled "The Boundary Conditions of an Arbitrary Medium", about taking advantage of limitations within product development workflows, and participated in a panel during Social Media Week on the value of sketching within the creative process. In general, my work focuses specifically on the intersection of the processes of design and technology, and have worked on both sides of the fence in the past (lead technical illustrator at a package design company, director of technology at an ad agency).

What is your favorite unit test framework and why?

While I'm a fan of phpunit, I haven't used it for any of our production systems, as our final deliverables are production html templates, css files, configuration and documentation systems. We've built an automatic documentation / testing system for our front-end code that integrates with dependency management systems for our production workflow, and while it may not be my favorite, it's certainly the one I use the most.

What is your favorite version control system and why?

We're in the process of migrating to git, primarily because of the advanced commit hooks, resulting in the ease of workflow integration. SVN has treated us relatively well for years though, and is what we based our previous deployment systems off of.