Monday, November 25, 2013

Cloud scripting with Google Apps Script

Lately, I've been interested in scripting the various Google apps to output various forms of data that our websites at my job can use. The Apps Script playlist by Google on Youtube has been an invaluable resource for me in keeping up to date with whats new as well as a great companion to the online documentation.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

One year later, new passions, and awesome experiences!

This past year has been a roller coaster of a ride in my professional life. November 16, 2013 will mark the 1 year anniversary that I accepted an offer letter by the Berkshire Hathaway company "Richline Group". Now some of you may say, "Wow Berkshire Hathaway! That name sounds familiar?!?" or "Richline Group, what do they do?", well, let me answer both of those for you. Whenever you hear the words "Berkshire" and "Hathaway" in the same sentence just think of Warren Buffet, that's his baby. As for the Richline Group, that's a little more complex but let me break it down.

First and foremost, Richline is a jewelry company. More specifically, it's a company that specializes in fine gold jewelry which we manufacture and distribute to a lot of the major retailers (both online and brick and mortar). We make other types of jewelry but gold is the bulk of it. Now for the complex part, it's actually a company that is the parent of a bunch of smaller jewelry related companies. These include Leach Garner, Rio Grande, Inverness, Honora, and Richline Brands (which is just a conglomerate of all out proprietary brands under one umbrella). Leach Garner specializes in processed materials for jewelry making (chain, beads, etc), Honora is one of the oldest pearl companies in the U.S., Inverness is an international ear piercing company. If you have your ears pierced it's possible you had it done using their patented ear piercing gun.

With that long winded introduction out of the way you may be asking, how in the world did you go from doing 3d stuff to jewelry? To that I say, I am part of the marketing team as the web developer and I absolutely LOVE IT! Not long ago I felt drastically different about web development (it was a hobby that became an "occasional" job) but, given the major advancements in what can be done in the browser my excitement for the craft has been renewed and I've been trying to keep up with the pace of awesomeness that keeps being birthed online.

Fortunately, this past year has been spent "modernizing" the various company sites, which means embracing a lot of the cool trends going on in web development and design. We have some really talented designers in the Florida office which I collaborate with to create engaging experiences and although we communicate through email and the occasional Google hangout it's mostly been a smooth ride. Here's the short list of projects I've worked on:

www.richlinegroup.com
www.richlinecreative.com
www.mayisgoldmonth.com
www.marieclairejewelry.com
www.charmedmemories.com

We're in the process of revamping the last three on that list for next year and I'm working on the "major" site redesign of one of our sister companies (to be launched Jan 1st 2014). So, that's what I've been up to these last few months. I haven't given up on 3D, I want to shift my focus to programmatic 3d on the web (Three.js and webGL), since programming is my original background. This blog will probably take a more web development focus in the future as I experiment and continue to learn.

For those that haven't seen my work, my 3D stuff is at thatguy.tv and my web development portfolio is at jonkkelly.tumblr.com. I'm planning a complete redesign of my personal site that will combine both areas of my work but that's going to take some time. I'll be sure to announce it when it happens.