About the Author

Ryan Brewer

TL;DR:

7yr old daughter: "What are you doing?

Me: "Writing a biography for work."

Her: "Is it boring?"

Me: "I'm writing about me—so no!"

Her: "So, boring. Did you say, 'I have an awesome daughter'?"

My career began when I answered a Craig's List ad to work with "5 guys and a pot of coffee!" For the next four years, I designed and coded Flash websites and themes for our company's eCommerce platform.

After that, I was off to the big leagues at VML(Y&R), where I happily switched to 0% design and 100% code. Growing my career alongside great teammates through clients like Ford, Western Union, and Sprint, I wrote code and eventually led teams and architected front ends. Some of my most memorable and challenging jobs were those with immovable deadlines, like Walmart's Black Friday In-Store Map app or United Rental's rental marketplace and management app or the P2P celebrity-video-chat event for Wendy's.

Surprising myself, after eight years at VML, I made the bold move to work for a startup. At GXM, I led a frontend team to create an E-Sports gambling site and a video subscription platform.

Once those were wrapped up, I set my sights on Keyhole. Hearing nothing but great things—even from, unexpectedly, my doctor—I was happy to be hired just as the 2020 pandemic was about to open up wide. It's been a great ride ever since!

Like our Uncle Bob Martin, I appreciate Clean Code. I say it's because it's elegant. My daughter says it's "because I have an awesome daddy!"

Four Ways of Writing Thoughtful Code to Think Less

Ryan Brewer Opinion, Programming 3 Comments

Long before I was offloading brainpower to Stack Overflow, I sought to offload it for my future self (ahem, and teammates of course). I have a book to thank for this. Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.”  It’s a critique of complex user interfaces.

Steve likes them simple and intuitive: the users’ goals are evident and easily accomplished.

Steve’s adage–“don’t make me think”–also plays a fair critique of the code we write. We can take that adage and apply it as a “DX First” approach to writing code. (An approach that admittedly should be sacrificed to UX or Performance Gods as needed.)

In this article I illustrate four high-level ways of elevating the developer experience to the forefront, helping us grok more while thinking less.