It all started when I became Head of Design, the largest authorization, and authentication API. I wa...

It all started when I became Head of Design, the largest authorization, and authentication API. I was brought after they raised a large series B round by the investors to increase independent developer sign-ups. The dev tools market is pretty competitive on the design side, and their site looked like Salesforce in 2005. They had gone through 15 designers in the five years they had been in operation, and I couldn't understand why. They had a huge customer base, and their team included more of the most well known open-source contributors then I had ever seen in one office. My entire career, I have been skilled in dealing with highly technical products and worked with well-known engineers successfully. But for the first time, I had to rethink how I was going to bridge the gap between design and development. I used a variety of tools to empower each developer not only to get excited about design but feel that they could participate and contribute to it. The solutions I will be touching on are living style guides, templated static site generators, and believe it or not, custom magnets (which I will elaborate on). I think at the end of the day; developers should have a grasp on how they can collaborate with designers more effectively and how they can start empowering themselves to become better at design.

All artists make messy sketches. All writers write terrible first drafts. All coders create dirty fi...

All artists make messy sketches. All writers write terrible first drafts. All coders create dirty first passes. Whether one wants to be a developer just to make a comfortable living, or create the tools and libraries that make today's internet work, it starts with creating... Anything! This talk speaks to how my book, "Modern Javascript by Example" unexpectedly took off in ways I would have never expected and brought about a new wave of "hit publish!" in my career. Showcasing and continuously publishing my work, whether it be writing, software, or speaking didn't immediately pay off, but months later and a profile full of blog posts, git repos, and talks on Youtube have amounted to success I never saw possible in my own career. In addition to the above, this talk presents a motivational aspect to encourage developers to stretch their imagination and create many small, fun little projects to showcase, and progress their skills, career, and talents to their full potential.