I’m currently doing front end development with the awesome team at Big Bad Goose to create the Goodies food discovery app for Walmart Labs.

It’s the first time I’ve had the privilege of working on a production web application running Ruby on Rails, backbone.js and using GitHub for source control. I’ve learned a ton, so here’s a little digest of each technology.

Because if it ain’t fun, it won’t get done

I created this blog to reflect on my journey to become a coder/designer. It is also a place for me to experiment with code and design. Although I’ve customized several Wordpress sites before, I decided I wanted to try something new and more lightweight.

I started out by simply hand coding the html for each post. Turns out that was way too much overhead, and posting felt like work instead of being fun. So it simply didn’t get done. I needed to streamline my authoring flow. Enter Octopress.

One of the best things about being a freelancer is the freedom to pick projects that allow for a flexible work schedule and contributing to a project remotely. It’s allowed me to keep designing and building web sites while I travel the world with my beautiful wife and visit our extended family.

I’ve been in Hong Kong for a good month now, and one thing that stands out is the sheer amount of smart-phone and tablet usage here. Even in mainland China, where incomes are lower than in Hong Kong, about 50% of the people on the riding subway are on a smart-phone or tablet. There are plenty of iPhones, but Android is the most prevalent.

For many in China, this kind of device is their main personal computer. Kind of like what’s happening everywhere else in the world. Hmmm.

A Note to Self

There comes a time in life, where you just go for it. This is one of those times for me. The past three years of life since graduating from college have provided me many opportunities to try my hand at design. For this I am very grateful.

I always felt that when I was in ‘design mode’ was when I created the most value, mostly because this is where I was the most passionate. I didn’t care if I had to spend several days of my own time learning something in order to bring an idea to life. It puts me in a state of “flow” and I once read that this is a very good thing.