Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson

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Work

HP—Make it Matter

Inheriting a project that had hit an impass, I rebuilt HP's Make it Matter website from the ground up to meet a complex and innovative animation and interaction brief.

I managed to back-track a scroll-jacking paradigm, and instead allowed users an unhindered scrollbar while still smoothly triggering animations and immersive video experiences while they explored HP's enterprise offerings. The site was aimed at CTOs and COOs targeted through paid digital media.

The site was integrated with HP's analytics platform and the header and footer were shared across all HP's website properties. Complex video pre-loading and memory management formed a substantial part of the exercise. The timeline was very aggressive, and a requirement to support older browsers made things challenging, but everything was completed and tested in time for a successful launch.

“We have had feedback to the tune of—the site is stunning!”

“We went live last night in both the UK & US. We have had feedback to the tune of, “the site is stunning!” We tested really well on our side before launch from a performance & browser compatibility perspective – both got a “green light”. Thanks for all your QA, it paid off! “The quality of the coding was well-done”, per the HP Dev team and the Analytics team said the tagging was close to perfect!

—Darlene Miller, Digital Marketing Manager at HP

A short time later, HP Enterprise split into its own company.

Netflix—Spoilers

Netflix had comissioned a study that suggested movie spoilers actually increased the likelihood of a person choosing to watch the movie. MUH-TAY-ZIK HOF-FER conceived of a website exploring this idea, which included a few quiz games and a Russian roulette style page on which you could click a button to instantly view a clip spoiling the ending of a famous movie or TV series on the Netflix service.

I handled all development and technical considerations, and directed design to allow for maximum flexibility. I prepared the site for the possibility of viral success, which proved valueable when we landed on Reddit's front page twice on launch day, earning the site over a million page views in its first 24 hours and over 10,000 video views per minute at its peak. Performance held up with zero degradation and videos loaded lightning fast because the virality kept them particularly hot on Amazon Cloudfront edge nodes.

“Screams could be heard throughout the newsroom. Caps lock proliferated the office chat room.”—Laura Stampler,

Some notable publications that featured the site were Time, CNN, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, The Verge, New York Times, CNBC, Refinery29, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, and Fast Company.

The site was awarded a One Show Silver Pencil, a Gold Addy Award in San Francisco (and a silver nationally), a Silver Clio, and made the shortlist for an Andy award and a Cannes Lion.

Judgey

My colleague Nate Gagnon and I launched Judgey, a browser-based game that gave players the opportunity to literally judge books by their covers. The site then compared players' cover-based ratings with the book's reader-based ratings (via Goodreads) and gave a score and a judgement-personality assessment.

The site made the Reddit front page and was covered in a few articles from Adweek, Gizmodo & HelloGiggles.

“Brilliant”—Otis Chandler, CEO Goodreads

A week later over 3 million book judgements had been cast, and I mined the data and published an article on Medium, which itself made the Reddit front page and was covered by FiveThirtyEight and The Independent.

AAA—24 Hours of More

AAA wanted to remind its current and future customers about the usefulness of its services and discounts. We built an interactive microsite to allow users to playfully explore AAA's offering, aided by an interactive dial that changed the time of day our AAA couple's adventure. The videos were produced by MUH-TAY-ZIK HOF-FER and I was principal developer and managed additional developers.

The site was built to scale to all interface sizes, but had specialized functionality involving large sprites and optimized GIFs to give mobile users an equally immersive and instantaneous experience with a lot of interactive moving imagery, despite some of mobile's physical limitations.

About

Engineering & Leadership

Having vision, and executing on a vision — these are two distinct skills that exist in tension. Both are required for cultivating sustainable excellence. As an engineer I take great pride in finding solutions and driving the details of a high quality production, and as a leader I understand the need for looking beyond today's urgencies to innovate and to inspire.

I have developed Individual Contributor specializations throughout my career, including Software Engineering (Web, Front and Back end), User Experience Design, Product Management, Digital Production, Strategy, SEO and Data Analytics. More recently I have led teams of engineers, providing guidance and supporting them in producing great products.

The internet has provided a fascinating paradigm for creativity. Due to the pace at which the environment and tools change, no-one can secure a lead without continual adaptation. The experts don't get to keep their lead with years of experience alone, because the tail end of that knowledge becomes obsolete so fast. The most effective players are those who can adapt the fastest, and continually mix their orthoganal experience with new methodology. Adaptivity is the only specialization truly worth its salt in technology.

Having worked at a number of early-stage silicon valley start-ups, I have become accustomed to the rate of progress that only a small, motivated team without too much hierarchy can seem to yield; where experimentation and initiative are fundamental, and every member feels a sense of ownership.

I have sought to ignite culture like this in the teams I have led, and have produced highly effective digital projects for companies like Netflix, HP and AAA.

My work has been awarded with a Silver Pencil (The One Show), a Gold Pencil, a Silver Clio, and a (national) Silver Addy. Sites I have created have been featured on Time.com, USA Today, CNBC, and others. I also created an interesting mini-game and mined its usage data. It was featured on Gizmodo and FiveThirtyEight. I hold a patent on a video streaming technology I helped develop.

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