Find a job you love…

… and you’ll never work a day in your life!

Anyone who knows me will appreciate that I regularly recite this mantra but I’ve perhaps been fooling myself a little in that I haven’t really ‘loved’ my job for the last wee while.

After some head scratching, a couple of properly difficult months and a bit of networking – I’ve made a sideways move to a Lead UI Developer role at work and am now finally following my long standing passion for all things front-end related.

I’ve spent a good number of years doing pieces of SQL DB work, data handling and putting together different elements of the server-side, but if I’m honest with myself I’ve never really gotten the same kick as I do when I take a design and implement it in responsive, semantic html & css. The buzz from hitting F5 on a browser and seeing a working website appear has never left me and nor do I ever want it to.

In my previous role I was more than happy to implement designs and get projects up and running visually, even doing the ‘admin’ stuff of pipelines, authentication and global load balancing too. I was challenged by some designs and had a great working relationship with the UX designers we had onboard. But there was always an expectation to do server-side stuff too, despite being relied on for my input and SME on front-end issues.

I am now concentrating my time, effort and experience on helping a team of highly talented and driven UX designers and researchers build out a suite of quality applications which meet the users and business requirements. As part of this I will be working very closely with the respective development teams who maintain the different applications.

I am going to be leaning heavily on my 20+ years in IT / web related roles, as well as flexing my Accessibility muscles a lot more as we aim to get as much of the tooling as possible to WCAG 2.1 AA.