Hi! My name is Brian E. McElaney
I carry a number of titles. Among them are Dad, Web Application Developer, Solutions Architect, Social Software expert, Enterprise Content Management and SEO Consultant, Startup Planning Consultant, aspiring cicerone(*) and Homebrewer, BBQ Pit Master (**), Foodie, Entrepreneur, Photojournalist, Former Marine (oohrah)...
Just listing all out makes me tired. (***)
The business card I carry says I am the “Principal Software Architect” for the famed design consultancy Electronic Ink in Philadelphia. Essentially that means I get to work around some really amazing Usability Experts, Researchers, Interface Designers and client-tier developers... and alongside those individuals I get to work with and for some really amazing clients. It's possible you'd recognize a few of the names.
My stint at Electronic Ink (****) has been an amazing educational experience – forever altering how I view the practice of application development. That’s what this site is about.
We will break the site down in to three main sections for now:
- Blog – Does anyone else out there really read blogs anymore? I don’t. This is an old school weblog – a record of the stuff I’ve done, comments on the industry and ideas in general. I hope developers will find something useful… more than that I hope developers will teach me something new.
- User Centered Development – My reason for being here – the User Centered Development section outlines a methodology to the practice of software development. I hope program managers will consider this approach with their next projects.
- Design Patterns – When I started writing code for Electronic Ink I had to do it in a LAMP environment. I’m gonna throw it out there – it is hard to learn how to write good code. This section will contain information on how to write better code.
Enjoy - and if you have any thoughts, comments or complaints feel free to hit me publically on my @mcelaney account on Twitter.
- Need to figure out how that’s pronounced, first…
- No… really… entered my first competition last year!
- It’s all a heck of a lot more fun in practice than it sounds in a paragraph like that
- I’ve been at Electronic Ink for about five years now - which represents about a third of the time I’ve spent mucking around with web applications since I wrote my first Pearl CGI script in 1995