Job Title:
Software Engineer
Place of Work:
ROLLER software, which is used to manage attraction venues.
Industry or specialization:
I tend to choose family-friendly problem domains, like an afterschool care provider in the past, or now ROLLER which is software for running attraction venues. These are easy for me to get excited about, since my two kids are part of the purpose of my life. But the nice thing about working in web dev is everyone wants a website, so I’ve had the pleasure of working in a lot of different industries which keeps me engaged. My resume might seem like I’ve done the same job my whole life, but there’s been enough variety of problems I’m solving that being a coder still feels like an adventure.
What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web?
My mum was a coder so my way of bonding with her when I was little was understanding what she was passionate about. We were poor, but she always managed to have some sort of programmable device at home like a Tandy TRS-80, an Apple IIe, or a 286 PC. These computers were outdated at the time I used them (I’m old, but not that old!) so they couldn’t run many of the games my friends were into. My childish brain’s solution was to attempt to create games for myself instead. I found that making graphical things was easier for a child to appreciate than text, but being on a computer by myself was both fun and lonely. For that reason, when I started reading in magazines about the World Wide Web in the early 90s I felt it would tick all the boxes for what I wanted computing to be.
My early experiences on the web were at a public library and you couldn’t ignore certain aspects of how a web page was structured – the library’s connection was so slow that I remember going to the Cadbury website and watching a graphic of a block of chocolate which was made up of multiple sections positioned using an HTML table. During the interval a website was slowly piecing itself together in front of my eyes, there wasn’t much to do except get curious about how it worked.
In 1999, I got internet access at home, ostensibly to help with my final year of high school. Instead, I used it to look up stuff you’d expect a 17-year-old to be interested in, and having home internet was probably the biggest threat to my grades. I also started to spend a lot of time in web chats, some of which allowed HTML, so you had to learn HTML to fit in with the group and try to be cool. I’m ashamed that as a teenager the first JavaScript I learned was how to bomb a chat with JavaScript alerts and feel powerful. Despite the distractions of unsupervised home web access, I got good enough grades to get into software engineering at uni. My other interest was professional writing, but engineering seemed like it would be easier to make money with.
The programming assignments were mostly command-line applications in Java, C, and C++, but one of the tasks in first year was creating a personal website by FTP-ing static files to a space provided by the uni. I learned how to add a picture of my face floating around by using JavaScript to manipulate CSS which at the time was called “dynamic HTML.” Flash was more in vogue back then than dynamic HTML, due to the cross-browser challenges and limitations of web tech, but I felt like dynamic HTML was the way of the future, just because using some proprietary plugin instead of what’s built into the browsers felt like cheating. The command-line programming assignments from the uni continued to be the focus of my degree, but JavaScript, HTML, and CSS became the things I would study for fun in my own time. That worked out for me because the jobs were mostly in web development by the time I graduated.
What does a typical day or week look like for you? What sort of things do you do?
I have about 45 minutes to an hour commute, so I get up early and do the morning routine of getting the kids ready for school, then listen to podcasts in the car or daydream about coding things to get in the mood for the day ahead. My wife and I try to walk every day after I finish work and we talk a lot. I like sharing with her about my challenges in coding or ideas I have for experiments with web tech. She’s not a programmer, but the way she was raised she’d never say a problem is outside of the scope of her knowledge, and instead she’d help in any way she could. She’s smart so somehow she understands what I’m rambling about and always offers helpful advice.
What types of web technologies do you work with most often?
JavaScript, C#, SQL, React, Angular, Vue JS, Flutter. I avoid being too much of a fanboy of any particular stack or framework, but I guess I’m a bit of a fanboy of the basic building blocks of the web like CSS, which is both annoying and amazing tech, but I feel safe loving it because I don’t think it’s going away, and once a feature gets added to the browsers, it’s hard to get for the vendors to get rid of it.
What is your favorite thing about your job?
Kinesthetic learning and the fact you can make good money making stuff rather than being in too many meetings or talking too much. I read “BS Jobs” by David Graeber and I like to think that computer programming is not one of them, even if the existence of those types of jobs might be an unfortunate side effect of automation. Given the obsession humans have with automating everything, maybe engineering will turn out to be the only real job left.
What do you wish you could change about your job?
I think it’s underrated how much the success of a software project depends on engineers having people skills and creativity. The term “code monkey” is literally dehumanizing and devalues the skillset that engineers bring to the table.
Where do you see your section of the web development/design/etc industry going?
I think there’s a misunderstanding of the value AI can bring, by some managers who have always thought software engineers are overpaid and that the logical conclusion of automation is to automate the automaters out of existence. I hope that the twist ending to this story will be that the people who think they can rationalize their IT departments because of AI will be forced to confront what software engineers do that a computer can’t. On the flipside I hope engineers will self-reflect that if most of what they are doing could be delegated to an AI, they need to shift their focus and expand their definition of what engineering is, and also take better advantage of their tools, including AI.
What technology and/or skill do you wish you learned before you entered the industry?
I wish there had been more focus on soft skills and relationship building which turns out to be the biggest challenge more than learning the tech. There was maybe one subject that focussed on this during my four-year degree. Even worse, I think I had a misconception that when I get good enough I’ll be an eighties movie rockstar guy who can build some world-changing thing by himself. It happens, but I think success more often turns out to be about what we can achieve together than about the technical prowess of any one person. Having said that, sometimes one great idea that leads to a paradigm shift can be pioneered by one person, so I haven’t completely let go of the fantasy of being a rockstar, in that I’m still secretly hoping my next blog post or open-source project will change the world.
What are you looking to learn or what skill are you looking to build next?
Lots of specific low-level stuff I’m curious about – including how to push the limits of view transitions, customizable select elements, scroll-state queries, and CSS custom functions. There are specific techs and patterns I’d like to dabble in more, such as htmx because I am always interested in things that could make web programming more approachable for people who aren’t professional programmers. I think declarative languages can do that. Some broader skills I’m interested in are creating a course on a platform like Udemy, and writing a programming book. I also have an ambition to make my own programming language which would attempt to make programming accessible for non-programmers – a visual programming language that takes advantage of AI to help guide the user to define the rules they want their program to follow. I’d also love to create a game that people like playing.
What questions should I have asked that I didn’t?
Given the zombie theme, maybe you could have asked “What are you most afraid of?” In my case, my biggest fear is getting so old that my brain stops working anymore so I can’t keep learning new things and coding. Or zombies eating my brain which would cause similar problems, but at least I get to become a zombie so I’d still have a peer group.
What would you tell someone to do who’s looking to get into the industry? How should they best prepare themselves?
Look for opportunities to let the right people get to see your skills and talent – blogging, Github, giving talks at meetups, and attending hackathons can all be a great advert for your skills. When I’m interviewing people it’s one of the things that helps me distinguish who is passionate. You don’t have to rely on someone else to give you a chance, because you can start building your online portfolio and the barrier to entry is low as long as you have the ideas, skills, and time. Time tends to be in shorter supply as you get older, so if you’re young and new to the industry, you have an advantage over an older guy like me who works full-time and has kids. It’s your opportunity to build your personal brand.
Anything else you’d like to tell future designers, developers and web people?
When you build a website don’t be afraid to challenge the assumptions for how it should look or what a website even is. I love finding pages that expand my notion of what’s possible on the web, and even if the subject matter isn’t my cup of tea it’s a way to get my attention. As long as you have a good reason to do something that subverts expectations, I think it takes a lot to shock a modern audience.
Is there a way people can get in contact with you to ask questions etc? or work you’d like to show off?
I think of CSS tricks as my home and creative outlet, so feel free to read my posts about my professional passions and experiments in dev and my thoughts on life. I welcome comments and try to respond to them. Hit me up on LinkedIn or peruse my Github.
Last Question: If you had to be a zombie and you had to eat someone’s brains, whose would it be and why?
Your brains. It seems like dramatic closure to this interview that I’d be so dangerous not even the interviewer is safe. Also, I don’t think zombies have deep reasons for choosing whose brains to eat – unless there’s a specific joke about it like on the Simpsons where Homer doesn’t have any brains for the zombies to eat. So the more I think about it, it would be impolite for me not to eat your brains when you’re right there interviewing me. Also you’ve written books and stuff, in case smarter brains are more tasty.
Editorial Note: This is exactly why I don’t do in-person interviews… Stop looking at me like that, Lee!