Job Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Product Development and Intelligence

My career in web development started with delivering products, not necessarily expectations. Starting as a lone web developer I've previously made the mistake of trying to put the product specifications before the client needs, focusing on what I can do technically and not what I should be doing to fulfill their requirements. Working at DealerFire has helped me start with the client expectations and work backwards to what we can do to meet them (which is how it probably should be, although this can easily result in a mismatch of perceived value and actual value). Thanks to a recent promotion, I'll be moving up to the next tier of delivery and responsibility - product intelligence.

When you work in a web development environment there is always a limit on what is possible with finite resources. That's something that holds up a lot of beginning developers and companies - getting caught up on the limits of what they currently know. Without full knowledge of current technologies or industry movements, it's easy to fall back on known territory and ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• business intelligence,
• customer service,
• dealerfire,
• job

Another New Year

Snap. Where did 2011 go?

Yup, last year was a bit busy. I've barely mentioned this on here, but I now work at DealerFire in Oshkosh. We mostly create custom websites for automotive dealerships, but there's a good mix of digital marketing, social media, and app development mixed up in there too. I'm the director of the production department, so I'm in charge of the majority of new products that go out the door. Last year that was about 200 websites. That's four sites launching every week. So yeah, 2011 was pretty dog gone busy.

There's been a lot going on outside of my job as well. I finally proposed to Katie Reynolds after five years of dating - we're going to get married in August! We also attended two big family weddings this year, one from each side, and got to make a lot of new introductions. Not everything has been good - there was far too many funerals and sad happenings for that. Overall 2011 has made me thankful for my friends and family as well as the time we have together.

So, what's the plan for 2012? What ...

• Tags:
• dealerfire,
• job,
• resolution,
• wedding

Microformatting the Resume

When a computer script crawls across the web looking for information (like Google's search robot) they need to do a lot of thinking to figure out what information is located on a web page. After all, web pages are written by humans for humans, with the data and information contained in our complex, contextual language. Web developers can help a script understand their site with robots.txt, xml feeds, and designated syntax (like using h1 tags for headers), and more recently, microformats.

The best way a script can understand text is by tagging it. This is how some xml formats work - you wrap the title with a <title> tag, set relative priority with a <priority> tag, etc. However, xhtml and older html formats only let you wrap normal web pages with standard tags, like p (paragraph), h1 - h6 (headers), etc. Microformats uses attributes of tags (like class names) to help computers understand what the content of a page is instead of the actual tags.

I recently dove into microformats with my resume, located on my ...

• Tags:
• job,
• my site

Abstracting the Resume

Recoding all of my subdomains to follow a model-view-controller framework has been a really interesting process. I've had the opportunity to experiment with different design patterns and techniques, especially in the realm of data handling and content delivery. Abstracting out my resume is a great example of how I'm handling my data in a way that provides necessary functionality at the moment while staying flexible enough for future rewrites.

Until recently my resume was written inline with html tags, merely included into different web pages as needed. This was a bad solution - every time I wanted to change a piece of it I had to wade through html tags. I couldn't place any dynamic content in my resume or reuse it in non-html formats. A cleaner solution was needed.

My first step was to divide up my resume into pieces. I have five main categories: objective, job history, skills, achievements, and education. The objective is a single line of text while the other four categories are lists. Some of these lists are lines of text while ...

• Tags:
• job,
• my site

Weekend on Mulligan Part A - Deer Lake

With a three-day weekend over Memorial Day I wanted to try a different hiking experience. Camping is a recent addition to my Upper Peninsula adventuring, but I still frequently use my car up north to drive from one hike to the next (and to grab the occasional fast food meal). Though I don't have the right gear for true backpacking I decided to try something close: set up a site on day one and walk everywhere, avoiding the car (and civilization) during the entire trip. I arrived at my destination, Mulligan Plains, in the twilight to set up for the first night.

Morning sunlight on Mulligan Plains

I didn't have time to change out of my clothes from work (shorts) and was attacked by mosquitoes the minute I stepped out of the car. A friendly local and his son was unpacking their truck for a weekend at his cabin, located on the other side of Mulligan Creek. We had a good chat about the area; he strongly suggested stopping by a number of lakes north of the creek for some good fishing. By the time he took off on his four ...

• Tags:
• contract,
• job

New Job and Car

The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. To provide a bit of back story, I've been living in Appleton, WI with my girlfriend's parents working a few different contract jobs since May of 2009. While our income was enough to cover a few bills and loan payments, freelance web development wasn't earning enough to cover moving out, so I started applying for fulltime positions in the local area.

In the beginning of August I headed out east with the Reynolds family for a wedding in Ocean City, WA. This trip involved several incredible dinners and a visit to our nation's capital on top of meeting some of Katie's extended family. Near the end of the trip I received an email about a job offer from De Pere, only twenty minutes from Appleton. SparkNET, the founding company of EzineArticles, wanted me as a web developer, a position I quickly accepted.

I've only been working at SparkNET for a few days now, but so far it seems to be a great fit. The atmosphere is very welcoming and open, ...

• Tags:
• job,
• katie,
• saturn ion,
• sparknet,
• vacation,
• wisconsin

Life After College

I was never worried about finding a job after college. Both degrees I undertook (physics and math) have severely limited job opportunities compared to other Michigan Tech degrees (computer sciences, engineering, etc), but I was too caught up in student life to worry about a career. Working through both high school and college, I figured that finding a good job after graduation would be easy.

The career fair options at the university always bombed for my degree (most attending businesses were only interested in engineers) and, with only weeks left, I applied for several jobs involving web development at Michigan Tech. The interview and application process was over in a short time and I had two job offers - and I took the more promising one. Little did I know that I'd be fired in ten months with even less opportunities available to me.

After being fired, I applied for several dozen jobs across the country. Not only was I excited about a brand new experience, but I wanted to leave Michigan and my university behind. With the bad economy ...

• Tags:
• job,
• katie,
• mtu

Moving to Wisconsin

After losing my job at Michigan Tech and testing out the job market in Houghton for a month, Katie and I decided that it was time to move. Several options presented themselves, including Seattle and Chicago, where friends offered free housing for several months until jobs and permanent housing could be found. We decided to move to Appleton, WI with Katie's parents after much discussion.

Over the last several years of dating Katie, we had visited her parents plenty of times both before and with Logan. Not only did we enjoy our time in Appleton, but they were very understanding of our relationship and current position. Also, even though I had applied to plenty of job opportunities across the nation, the only interviews and interested companies I had contact with where in the Milwaukee and Green Bay area. It made sense to move to a familiar location that seemed promising for a future career.

I did have some hesitations on moving to Wisconsin, mostly because I was raised in Michigan. I don't know many people or attractions within the ...

• Tags:
• job,
• katie,
• wisconsin

Getting Fired

I was hired to work for Michigan Technological University after a short, informal process immediately after graduating in the spring of 2008. Starting under the department of Auxiliary Technologies as a beginning web developer, I was the sole manager for dozens of websites and web applications. After ten months of complaint-free work, I was fired from my position in an extremely negative manner.

During my employ at Michigan Tech, I don't feel that I was the perfect employee. When a friend of mine was hospitalized after a camping accident, I took a week's worth of emergency leave after sending my boss and colleagues a brief e-mail explaining the situation. I usually showed up to work early, especially during the summer, so that I could leave early to work around the house or go hiking with my dog. There were several projects I worked on that fell behind schedule, sometimes due to my inability to keep up with a large workload. However, while I admit these shortcomings as an employee, none of them were listed as a reason for my ...

• Tags:
• job,
• mtu