I went to school for illustration way back when but ended up teaching myself programming by playing with Flash (RIP). My first job was working on season one of Pinky Dinky Doo, a children’s TV show animated entirely in Flash, before moving on to making games for the Scholastic Kid’s site.
I eventually moved to standards-based HTML, CSS and Javascript and did freelance front end web design and development via my one-person company, Beard, Beard & Beard (RIP). I then joined Wireless Generation (RIP, now Amplify Education) as a UX Engineer, using my design and development skills to prototype and test new interfaces for their educational software using various tools and techniques.
Around that time the fun had started with native mobile apps and I moved to Prolific Interactive (RIP) as Director of Product Development. During my seven years there we went from 12 people to almost 100 over three offices. Over that time I had a lot of fun wearing multiple hats whenever needed: Product, Design, Engineering, UX Research, you name it. Most of the time though I acted as a product manager and oversaw dozens of app launches.
Then, after almost 20 years in NYC my wife, son, and I moved to the Boston area (NYC is great but, no, I don’t really miss it) and I transitioned to a remote role as a Design Technologist (kind of like a UX Engineer). But it wasn’t long before Prolific got acquired by WeWork and I joined them as a Senior Prototyper (yet another name for UX Engineer or Design Technologist-type work). I wasn’t there long though (RIP, haha, jk) but it was a fun and interesting few months of feature discovery and research. No hard feelings.
During the pandemic I did UX and product consulting for a few early-stage startups and eventually joined Dadventures as the full-time Director of Product. We iterated on product-market-fit but couldn't grow fast enough and eventually had to shut down. RIP.
After that I joined the Techstars Boston Winter 2021 class as a Product Design Associate, and now I work at Oracle as a UX Engineer.
Outside of work I enjoy being a dad and husband, which sounds trite and cliché, I know, but really is fun and rewarding. And scary. But fun.
I also still like to draw and I occasionally take life drawing and reportage classes with Dalvero Academy which is run by some of my teachers from Pratt. I deleted my Instagram account (and Facebook/Whatsapp too, bleh) but I'll put some of my old pics up soon.
Back in NYC, I was a member of the Gotham City Beard Alliance (RIP) where I competed in a handful of beard competitions in the northeast US. Never won anything though.
Later, Joe