Today marks my 1-year anniversary with Loop and I feel like I’ve learned a lot, some of which I’ll eventually write about. There have been a number of changes in my life, with more on the way, and I finally feel ready to (cautiously) jump back into my social media dabblings.

Last February I unintentionally put off some coworkers with this post. (In hindsight, I could have sung my praises for Dan in a better way.) I feel that the awkward conversations that followed help clear things up in the office, but they also led to my immediate abandonment of Twitter (of my own volition) and a decreased interest in blogging.

Much to my detriment.

There’s a lot to gain from putting yourself out there and I plan on taking advantage of it once again, but I’m feeling pretty mindful of the experience I had and of the poor examples other people /companies provide. My only concerns are; 1) time, and 2) letting myself fall into the gamification of social media — I don’t want the number of comments/followers/retweets/whatevers to become the justification of any renewed efforts. I recognize that there’s a lot to gain from competitiveness and popularity, but it just feels disingenuous to who I am…

The normal nerves that go with a new position have started to settle down now that I’m going into my 3rd week at LoopFX. I’m really happy to have joined the team; everyone is fantastic and the work is both gratifying and challenging. It’s something of a change to go from client-work web development to online application development, but I don’t think I could go back any time soon:

1. My “client” is the company I work for. There’s a team of people that take pride in what what we do, which can be very motivating.
2. “Normal” client-work often included a lot of hand-holding, which I do not miss. Yeah, I still have to make sound arguments for my ideas but I don’t think I’ll ever have to explain the difference between a search box and the browser’s address field.
3. IE6 was a real factor in my client-work — it still represented about 10% of the viewers. To my absolute delight, Loop does not support it. (Hell yeah!)

I’ve largely spent my time redesigning a number of forms (still one of the more challenging parts of web design, if you ask me) as well as a few pages. I almost feel guilty with the amount of time and energy I’ve gotten to put into the redesigns — the client-work I did never afforded me the luxury of user interviews or extra design time to improve the experience. I think that speaks to the biggest difference I’m seeing between client-work and app development: when presented with the Triple Constraint (Cost, Time and Quality), many clients focused on Cost alone, whereas Loop focuses on Quality and works with the constraints from there.

I really do love what I’m doing and the people I do it with, yet there’s something of a skill gap that I’ve got to close. Everyone has been very understanding and helpful, but for the foreseeable future I’ll be pushing myself to learn  ASP.NET and C# (with some brushing up on jQuery for good measure).

A few members of the Loop team during Hawaiian Shirt Day (I'm hidden in the very back-left)