01 Mar A Day in the Life of the Chief Technology Officer at Ignite Social Media
Ignite Social Media is a unique company, not only because we were the first social media marketing agency, but also because of our company culture. We have Community Managers, Content Producers, Strategists, Analysts, Influencer Specialists and more, all with different personalities that combine to bring this company full circle. How do I fit into this circle? Well, in every organization, someone is ultimately responsible for the technology and infrastructure of the company, and for the past 8 years, that one person has been me.
Due to the uniqueness of our company, many people ask what it’s like working at Ignite. To answer that in one blog post wouldn’t do it justice, so throughout this month we’re going to take a deep dive into our different departments and pick out the pieces that make us tick, make us work hard, and make us love coming to work every day. And since I’m the one telling you this… well I’ll go first.
Let’s see, today I spent a good chunk of my time wrapping my head around a new marketing automation tool called Mautic that we’re putting in place. I don’t read instructions (those are silly), but I think I figured it out. Also spent some time with our IT support partner, OnPar, going through a new support ticketing platform they want to roll out to us. Cool tool. Cool company. Pretty uneventful day.
Oh yeah, Ignite President, Jim Tobin, decided to move one of his desks next to mine. #joy. He has one of those stand-up desk setups, which will allow him to look over onto my desk.
Note to self: look into investing in a Snowden head blanket.
Yesterday, I spent the day mapping out how best to port a legacy MongoDB/PHP app over to PostgreSQL/Rails. Went down a rabbit hole looking into PostgreSQL’s JSONB suport. Very cool. I also hopped on to several Hack.Summit presentations throughout the day. This is the second year that I’ve participated. The price of a ticket is actually a donation to a non-profit of your choosing that teaches people how to program. I’ve donated to Black Girls Code both years. When I wasn’t in the rabbit hole or paying attention to presentations, I spent some time digging deep into the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) spec again. It’s coming along and maturing nicely since it was first announced last year. Really excited about AMP and it’s potential.
If you made it this far into my post, I’ll reward you with a list of some tools that I use on the daily:
* MacBook Pro (with Retina display) at work and MacBook Air (13 inch) at home, both with El Capitan….I just just like saying El Capitan (who names these OS’s?)
* Paw, an API REST client tool. Indespensible in investigating APIs
* Sublime Text 3 — I’m a late convert. Had been using TextMate for years until they stopped developing it.
* Github to store the beginnings of apps that I’ve lost interest in. It doesn’t help that I don’t document these things. I like to call these MVPs (minimum viable products) — emphasis on the M and not very V.
* Slack — We don’t use this internally, but I always have it open. Here’s a list of some communities that I’m in: OpenData Community, Ruby on Rails, Ruby Developers, #startup, CryptoCommunity, Technical.ly, 21co, among others.
* Other random tools: Transmit, iTerm2, MongoHub, Postico, Google Chrome
* Lots Of Black Tea
