Trial by fire. Best Buy was where I cut my web development teeth. A lot of learning, a lot of growing, and almost two years of being on-call 24/7. A lot of great memories and stories came out the Best Buy Digital Insert
Building an API, every week #
The deals.bestbuy.com site had to be hand built every week. With an average of 39 pages of products with at least 9 sku's each, this meant a lot of hard work to ensure that everything was hooked up correctly. Like all great APIs of the era it was an excel spreadsheet that was uploaded and deployed every Sunday morning at 3 a.m.
In addition to this, custom "hero tiles" had to be custom coded every week to highlight special deals and other products that didn't quite fit into the "Image, Title, Price" paradigm. I had a lot of fun creating special hoverstates and animations.
But most importantly this turned into a well oiled machine. I automated much of the custom coded production work. At the beginning of the week I would run some scripts that would build out the tiles I needed. I would create custom development tools for my colleagues to make their lives easier.
Troubleshooting during a Marathon #
Being the only developer for much of my time at Wunderman in support of Best Buy meant that I was the frontline in case of any technical issues. Did our partners forget to public the videos we were expecting? Did someone (me) accidentally copy and paste besbuy.com instead of bestbuy.com? All of those were worthy of a ring to my bat phone.
I pride myself on the relationships I built during my time at Wunderman:
