Following five excellent years of service, K.Adam White has left Bocoup. What can you do in five years of participation on the open web? K.Adam’s answer: quite a lot.
K.Adam’s main squeeze has always been WordPress. He’d already made a name for himself in that project before he joined up at Bocoup, and he kept on advancing that platform throughout his time here. He championed the REST API for interacting with WordPress sites, and he created the client library for Node.js. He shared his perspective on this work by writing blog posts and speaking at professional conferences.
As a consultant working on the web platform, K.Adam was regularly tasked with building new experiences and choosing from a huge collection of viable tools. In these situations, it’s always most comfortable to stick to your guns and build using familiar technologies. Sometimes that’s appropriate, but the industry moves fast, and it’s important to recognize when new tools are fundamentally better-suited to the task at hand. This is something K.Adam understood innately; through his time at Bocoup, he would teach himself to work with the latest proven tools, ranging from AngularJS, Node.js, D3.js, and React. This typically occurred in the context of a consulting engagement, but he would also use passion projects to motivate his advancement. My personal favorite was the fruit of his experiments in JavaScript application frameworks: “MBTAwesome” (a site which visualized the status of the local subway system, filling a widely-felt need during a time when the MBTA offered no such service).
His experience as a software maintainer in the world of WordPress leant him empathy to the needs of these projects. He didn’t just use them; he actively contributed to their development. For example, his contributions to the p5.js library were recognized by the maintainers in Getting Started with p5.js.
He also evangelized the adoption of open web tooling by serving as Bocoup’s most stalwart meetup chaperone. There was of course Boston WordPress, but he also organized BostonJS, and he was always ready to lend a hand at any of the other meetups at the Bocoup Loft.
Software development is inherently social, and K.Adam embraced that aspect of the practice. He volunteered with the Science Club for Girls, a non-profit dedicated to promoting STEM education for girls in grades K through 12. He shared his personal passion for the arts (just one motivation for his self-study in data visualization) by regularly organizing company trips to showings in Boston, Cambridge, and beyond. And though he was a Massachusetts resident through his time at Bocoup, he supported team in New York City through regular visits to our office there.
These days, you’ll find K.Adam at Human Made, serving up his skills as a data visualization specialist. Following some notable life milestones including marriage and a move to New York City, we’re excited to see that he’s back to his old tricks in the WordPress ecosystem. Keep making us proud, Kadam!
