Pam Drouin really drew us in with her impressive design skills and warm personality… so we’re thrilled to announce that she’s joined the team at Bocoup!
Pam started her career as a librarian, having earned degrees in English Literature as well as Library and Information Science, but ultimately, her love of computers and meaningfully organized information inspired her to explore a career in design. Pam joins us most recently from Proquest and the University of Washington, where she spent time in product and design roles, further deepening her skills in user interaction and experience, content strategy, and information architecture.
Back in April I wrote about Bocoup's excitement for the recently announced Tessel 2 in "Pushing NodeBots Into The Future with Tessel 2". Since then, we've worked side-by-side with the Tessel Project to help them realize their platform vision for the next stage in the evolution of the Tessel. With shipping underway, we're excited to start publishing a series of "getting started" guides that will provide the basic building blocks to create Johnny-Five applications for the Tessel 2.
Over the last ten years, the servers that power jQuery and its associated projects have evolved from a single shared webhost to a complex fleet of more than thirty virtual machines. Recently, I have been working with the jQuery Foundation to reel in this decade of organic growth by standardizing the configuration management of our infrastructure using Ansible. I'm writing this post to share some of the things I learned along the way.
Before I dive into the details, I’d like to take a minute or two to explain what configuration management is. To set the tone, see this quote from my colleague on the open web Greg Smith:
At Bocoup we believe that focusing on crafting resilient and accessible experiences is the most effective way to build digital services. This philosophy and practice extends to our learning design. In an earlier post, I talked about building a curriculum framework with a design driven approach—this involved user research, persona and journey map development, and some testing. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the next phase for the workshop offering: lesson plan development.
Education and learning have always been a core part of what we do at Bocoup. From our earliest days in Fort Point, we've held classes dedicated to teaching people to build on the Open Web, the subjects evolving along with the platform itself. Over the past few months, we've been working on a new format for sharing knowledge and skills with the community of passionate practitioners who follow our work, our team members, our open source projects, and (especially in your case) our blog.
Our pal and longstanding Bocouper Greg Smith has left Bocoup to work with the fine folks at Brightcove.
Greg joined Bocoup back in 2011, and he's accomplished quite a lot since then! Between completing 91 (his ambitious crowd-funded role playing game), single-beardedly developing boxbox, launching the ever-popular learnlayout.com (and the not-quite-as-popular isitmarchfirst.com), and presenting a bunch of great tech talks, he's certainly kept himself busy. But his contribution to our team has been far more integral than a laundry list of achievements could describe.
This winter we will be offering a workshop series focusing on user experience design. We craft our educational offerings using similar practices to how we design products: using a goal oriented and design driven methodology. In this post, I’ll be sharing the process for how we went about developing this new workshop offering.
Choose a time to user test, then run a two week curriculum writing sprint
We've had some great opportunities for team bonding lately thanks to our newest teammate—Lorin Bond! Lorin brings a strong background in business consulting and project management, a keen interest in developing accessible software, and an excellent last name for a project manager.
Lorin joins us from Chevron, where she built a software usability center for its 4,500+ IT employees. She earned her MBA and MS in Information Systems from Boston University, and served previously as a consultant for non-profits and government agencies at CirclePoint and the Coro Center for Civic Leadership. In her spare time, Lorin enjoys volunteering with the Boston-based STEM networking group She Geeks Out and Community Servings, a nonprofit focused on providing healthy meals for the critically ill.
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