Ian O'Dea

Freelance

(2006-Present)

Do you have an independent game you're marketing, and need a lightweight website with beautiful animations that integrates with whatever sales platform you're using? Ian has experience working with a wide variety of platforms and is always happy to learn more, for their friends.

If you're one of Ian's friends, or have a referral from one, reach out and they very well may be able to help you out.

Here's an example of a marketing site they've built under this policy.

Preferred Technologies

Middleman, Node.js, SASS/SCSS, Vue, Netlify, Github

Bright Bright Great

(2020-2021)

Ian was the Front-End Development Lead at Bright Bright Great, ensuring that designs were built in a clean, scalable, performant, usable manner. These Wordpress sites were built on a Laravel/Bedrock/Sage back-end stack and a SASS/Vue front-end stack, with assets compiled via Webpack.

They implemented automated build & deployment practices, lead internal efforts to improve organizational understanding of accessibility standards & practices, and architected huge improvements to the contribution & onboarding workflows for developers (including guidelines for migrating its' virtualized development environments from x86 to ARM).

Core Technologies

Wordpress, Laravel, Bedrock, Sage, SASS/SCSS, Vue, Webpack, DeployHQ, Kinsta, Github

Blackbox

(2016-2020)

Blackbox is a shipping company that was formed to help independent creators fulfill crowdfunding projects and transition into ongoing sales with a focus on global distribution & customer service.

When Ian started as Blackbox's sole UX developer, Blackbox had logistics, a purchasing widget, and a sales dashboard for its clients, but no ownership over the user experience for that dashboard. In a few months, they built a feature-packed design system & CSS framework that removed Blackbox's dependency on third-party CSS and created an engaging, branded experience for its clients that worked on a wide array of devices.

Over the next several years they managed the ongoing health of that design system, layering in functional & accessible improvements and refining its documentation while allowing Blackbox's designers & developers to ideate & iterate quickly while focusing on the aspects of their work that they were best at doing: delivering consistent, thought-out, performant tools for their clients & internal users.

Ian was also the sole developer on most of Cards Against Humanity's marketing sites through this period. Even the award-winning ones.

Core Technologies

Ruby on Rails, Middleman, SASS/SCSS, Angular, Vue, Webpack, CircleCI, Github

Groupon

(2011-2016)

Groupon is (was?) a marketplace for finding discounts & deals that expanded into the lucrative “basically Overstock.com” business. Honestly, who even knows what exactly it is at this point?

At Groupon, Ian's primary responsibility was developing & maintaining the deal page; as one of the most important pages to their business, this meant that they were at the nexus of many of the company's initiatives (whether that was starting to sell physical goods, a failed full-scale redesign of the site, a later successful full-scale redesign of the site, or converting a monolithic Rails stack into a fleet of lightweight Node.js apps).

Their secondary responsibility, undertaken with several fantastic front-end comrades, was taking the mess of front-end code that had been developed (often duplicated in multiple conflicting manners) as Groupon ballooned in size and turning all of that into as tidy a design system as possible. This work made Groupon's successful redesign effort possible, and appears to still be the basis of all the work they do today.

Core Technologies

Ruby on Rails, Node.js, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, Backbone.js, Jasmine, Mocha, Selenium, Jenkins, Github