What I do for a living

My resume is now on LinkedIn because that's how things are done these days. But here it is again anyway:

I'm a UX/IA designer turned front-end developer turned engineering manager, with extensive experience working with fully-remote and hybrid remote/local teams. I work best in situations involving a lot of uncertainty, change, and growth -- which can mean a startup transitioning to a real live grown-up company, a departmental reorg, an older product in need of substantial rework or redesign, or a greenfield project in need of scoping and definition.

I’ve worked full-time on the web since 1994 or so; my first real job was as a designer at one of the first commercial websites ever: tripod.com. (It still exists. Sort of. My work there predates the Internet Archive, so is lost to history — only a few remnants, and a promotional T-shirt or two, remain.) The major web browser was NCSA Mosaic, and the only background color was #808080 — I still remember the excitement when Netscape 1.0 rocked the world with new HTML tags like align and <font>. We hung neckties from the ceiling, and joked that every company needed exactly one graybeard to lend respectability.

My beard is now... pretty gray.

I was the primary template author and graphic designer for the first version or two of Prentice Hall’s Companion Website software. I was also responsible for the main Prentice Hall site design for a few years. From there I moved to eCollege.com, where I was one of two designers responsible for a complete functional and UI overhaul of their eCourse product, the version 1 design of their eCampus product, and several other projects that began with the letter “e”.

Starting in 2000 I worked as an independent contractor, mostly in the distance-learning market: major clients include InformIT, Prentice Hall School, Infravio, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Riverside Publishing, ANGEL Learning, Vericite (now TurnItIn) and Blackboard. At MHHE I designed and built several different template sets for Novella / Online Learning Center versions 1 and 2, and took ClassWare from use cases through several rounds of wireframes and architecture mockups to final implementation: I personally built all the prototypes and wrote virtually all of the front-end (XSLT) and client-side code for the product.

I also did the usual assortment of other freelance gigs, including software architecture and UI consulting, custom CMS development, e-commerce and social networking applications, and lots of good old brochureware eye candy.

In 2013 I left freelancing to take on a full-time position as the product designer and lead front-end developer at In The Telling (now Narrasys). When I joined ITT, they had a proof-of-concept web application that could display transcripts and some supporting content alongside a video timeline, backed by a largely manual data-entry process. I led a full redesign of the product into a platform that allows end users to design and edit in real time "transmedia narratives": animated page layouts, images, transcripts, links, and interactives synchronized to cue points within a series of video streams, all built within a flexible template-based design system. It's a good product. I'm still pretty proud of it.

I spent a couple of years working solo on a new type of web browser, focused on extracting and aggregating relevant data from web pages and discarding the rest. It used a combination of machine learning, crowdsourced data, and heuristics borrowed from the web-scraping world to identify which parts of a page are most likely to be relevant; and then allowed the user to decide how that gathered information is archived and presented. I learned a great deal during this time, including the fact that working in complete isolation does not suit me at all.

VidMob asked me to join their engineering team in 2019, finalizing my slow crossover from design into development. Shortly I crossed over again, this time into management, and discovered somewhat to my surprise that that seemed to work out just fine! Building an engineering team is not so different from building a user-facing product: in both cases the goal is to help your users (developers) get their work done via predictable and intuitive workflows (development and planning processes) subject to the constraints of budget / time / physical reality -- and to make it all attractive and pleasant enough to work in to attract more users (or team members) in the future.

Post VidMob I returned to McGraw Hill, this time as a full-time employee instead of a contractor. I've worked on a variety of projects, including contributing to the flagship Connect product and leading the team building a greenfield sales enablement program. I'm currently serving as Principal for Developer Enablement & Excellence, working to improve the dev environment and practices for approximately 500 engineers in the Higher Education division.

I'm good at fostering a sense of teamwork and collaboration, both within my engineering teams and across disciplines: my past experience as a UX designer and IA specialist helps me bring your designers' vision to reality, and my experience scoping and planning projects as an independent contractor helps me communicate well with both your product management team and with external vendors.

If you'd like to talk, or see samples of my work, please contact me at (my first name) @danielbeck.net — let me know what type of thing you're looking for and I can dig up something current to show you. I'm open to continuing in Engineering, migrating back to Design, or even trying my hand at something in Product if you want to help me complete the trifecta.