Music and exploring different instruments has really captivated me. I’ve recently purchased a mandolin and ukulele to expand my musical thinking. There is always so much to learn!
I think it comes down to the ability to combine my love of technology with math, science and art. I’ve also been able to share time with my daughters and have fun teaching them the art of making music. It’s great quality time that we can share together!
I’ve always loved Bootstrap for how simple it is. In fact, these pages are built using Bootstrap 4. The 12 column grid layout and different responsive sizes make for quick and clean layouts. I also really like Atlassian’s Design system. I think it offers a wide breadth of components, animations and features.
My ideal process is broken into a few parts.
I think every great product starts with the why. There has to be a need, want, utility or reason. Second, a great product has a great strategy behind it. By breaking the product design life cycle into steps it allows for certain areas to have focus.
My nice to haves are weighted based on their importance. Time management becomes extremely important. Rating the importance of features can help you determine how to manage your time. I generally favor function over form. It has to work well and complete the task first and then look great!
Most recently I built a Work From Home app for my current company. The app was designed to synch to the employee’s Outlook calendar. It used a service integration alongside a client side UI built within Sharepoint. It also used a custom branding css file that can be included in all of our projects. The app was designed so that multiple dates could be entered at one time. The dates would then get sent to the employee’s manager and once approved would show on their outlook calendar for the entire company to see. Being a hybrid work from home environment, those dates could change each week, but their could only be two in one week. Requirements were important and so were allowing exclusions.
The design process was done through prototyping an overall layout and then individually working through each tab. Each week the prototype was shown to the executives and the features were thought over and reviewed. It led to important discoveries and new rules/requirements.
The app worked really well with sending dates to outlook and to allow employees and managers to see their schedule as “Working elsewhere”. The app was easy to update and worked off a json REST model in order to deal with requests. If anything could have been done better it would be making sure the employee records were up to date in AD. But the app solved one more issue! Many managers were not correct in AD and the entire process allowed employee’s to discover this.
The next iteration included features such as manager comments, better exclusion handling, better email notifications, and a faster overview calendar within the app. It made me realize how important design really was. Some features were very intuitive and easy to use while others could have been improved and made easier for users. Overall it highlighted the need for a great user experience that was simple and intuitive!
As a programmer I would definitely say ChatGPT. I mentioned it to my co-workers because I could see the potential immediately. As we dug in more we discovered GitHub Co-pilot. Wow! What a great product with so many use-cases. It certainly changed the world.
It was helping me in so many ways! As a technologist and musician, there were many things it did well for me!
It was obvious what a great tool chatGPT would be in my life. While it may not have all the answers and can sometimes be wrong, it is great for the things I listed above and has been a great help to me in my career and life.
I can think of few but one service in particular comes to mind. Facebook Live. Facebook Live is a great tool and I am not here to down it but it has one feature that has caused some confusion for us Apple users. Streaming in landscape mode while using my iPhone wasn’t working properly.
Although Facebook Live showed the correct orientation it streamed the wrong orientation and the video was sideways. I tried removing the screen lock prior to going live and still no change. It turns out the fix was much simpler than I thought! In order to do landscape mode on an iPhone, you must change one setting that is not at all obvious. That setting is Display View Zoom. Setting the value to “Standard” under the display and brightness setting was not at all obvious. It drove me crazy that it was something so simple but yet seemingly unrelated!
I think there are a few options here depending on the programming.