Six months

Posted 24 hours ago

I started a new job as a UX Developer for Revive Our Hearts ministry six months ago today. I had planned to write a post when I celebrated my two month mark in June. But life got in the way and now the calendar is on September October. I wanted to share a little bit about my new role and things that I learned from the process.

I accepted this job after a long year of unemployment. It was one of the most challenging years of my life. At times, I wondered if I would still be working in this industry and be able to continue to build upon my years of experience as a front-end developer. I am so grateful that God provided me with this opportunity to work with Revive Our Hearts in the role that I am in.

Coming home

This job has been like coming home. My first full-time post-college job was with Campus Crusade for Christ. My wife and I served in that ministry for 16+ years. Our last 10 years was spent at the World Headquarters in Orlando. I had the chance to become a pioneer in Internet ministry as I worked as a web designer and front-end developer for the National Campus Ministry. I got my start as a Web professional there and now I feel like I have come full circle as I have brought my gifts and talents to another ministry, Revive Our Hearts.

I had the privilege of getting to onboard with the ministry at their office in Niles, Michigan. Being there brought up familiar feelings of working at Campus Crusade’s office. It was a bit like stepping back in time and reacquainting myself with “ministry Jeff.” And I enjoyed getting to meet so many wonderful co-workers in my three days in Michigan. I felt very welcomed and valued from the get go.

That trip to Michigan was also a vision building time. Before the trip, I was thinking of this as just another job. But after hearing the executive director tell the story of Revive Our Hearts and about some exciting opportunities ahead, I had greater sense that this was indeed a calling and that God had placed me here for such a time as this. You can read more of that story if you are interested.

Onboarding

Onboarding is a difficult experience. In a lot of ways, it is starting over. You have new relationships to form and you have to learn how to best work in these relationships. You have new systems and procedures to learn. The CMS that Revive Our Hearts uses was completely foreign to me and I had to learn new workflows.

It is a very humbling experience to onboard into a new job. And it can be very tiring both physically, socially, and emotionally. I had moments where I thought I had finally figured something out only to fall flat on my face and realize I still had so much to learn.

But I received nothing but grace and encouragement from my teammates. Everyone was so patient with me. People were excited that I was here doing the role that I was doing and I knew from the words and actions of my teammates that they were cheering me on and wanted me to succeed.

Django CMS

Revive Our Hearts websites use Django CMS. As I mentioned earlier, this content management system was completely foreign to me. It is the first CMS that I worked on that does not use PHP and a LAMP stack1. Django is powered by Python but the nice thing is that I don’t have know about Python to do my work. I continue to focus on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I have had to learn some specific template tags which are very similar to Twig, which I used in building Craft CMS sites.

It has been frustrating at times to understand how our Django sites work. There are several different ways to build new pages. Some of our pages use custom templates and all of the content is stored in the codebase. Other pages utilized page templates and get their content from CMS fields much like WordPress or Craft. But then there are also pages that utilize plugins (not like WordPress plugins), which are extremely flexible and give you a variety of options similar to WordPress blocks. You can use plugins to add CSS and JavaScript to the page or compose entire snippets of HTML code to add to the page.

I am learning a lot and trying to determine the best way to add content and work with the system and not against it. I am getting more and more familiar with it each day and have been able to figure out some things on my own without having to ask one of our other devs. It is just an adjustment to learn a new CMS that functions very differently from the PHP based ones that I have used in the past.

Site architecture

One of the things I have had to adjust to is the complexity of the site architecture of the Revive Our Hearts sites. The sites are much bigger than the sites I have built over the past 15 years working with agencies. The build utilizes much more of a “component” mentality breaking up different templates and stylesheets into smaller components. That can make it tricky to find the stylesheet or template that I need to update in order to address many of the tasks assigned to me.

At first, I found it very frustrating because it was hard to always trace where to find things. But as I have had time and become more familiar with the site and it architecture, those frustrations are becoming less and less.

The previous front-end developer utilized more of Sass than I was accustomed to. He made use of a lot of partials, placeholders, and extends. And that presented more of challenge of finding where I needed to update code in order to fix something or refactor a new solution.

Humility check

One of the things I struggled with in the first few months of this job was pride. I would ask questions like, “Why would anyone do it this way?” My frustrations with the complexities of the build or with my lack of experience would lead me to wonder why code was written the way that it was. It was not the way that I would choose to do it.

Ana Rodrigues addressed this attitude in her CSS Day talk, Refactoring CSS. I appreciated that she took time to remind me that just because someone did it differently did not mean that it was wrong. We all have our strongly held opinions. It reminds me of an axiom that I was taught before my first overseas experience. “It isn’t wrong, it just different.” When we enter other cultures, we need to be quick not to pass judgement on their ways of doing things. It is not wrong, it is just different.

The same holds true with web development. It is not wrong, it is just different. We will never understand all the factors that led someone to make the decision they did about how to code something or the site architecture choices they made. We need to believe the best about people. We need to resist the urge to want to rewrite the entire codebase just to align with our opinions or our ways of thinking. If it works, leave it alone. If it doesn’t work, come up with a new solution. But don’t judge the previous developer because you don’t know what she or he was dealing with at the time. I am sure that there is code that we ourselves have written and then later revisited and wondered what we were thinking to do it that way.

As I got more familiar with Django and the codebase, I began to realize more and more why the previous developer made the decisions he did. I had more empathy and began to see that it was a better way of doing given the constraints of the CMS than the solutions I thought were “better.”

I am glad that this onboarding experience made me more aware and reminded me of my need for humility in approaching my work.

The nature of the work is different

One adjustment I have had to make is the nature of my work today is different from when I worked at an agency. I am working more with an existing product. Whereas in my agency work, I was building most of my projects from scratch. The two are very different in nature. Working with a product means that you are doing more little tweaks here and there instead of building something new from the ground up.

A lot of my work builds upon work that others have done. And as I have already discussed, building upon a lot of the decisions made by others versus making the decisions myself in those new builds.

I have not had as many chances to build new things. The new things that I tend to do now are smaller page components or refactoring existing pages to look better or work better. I have had the chance to make more design decisions on my own with a couple of products. I got to “design” a page for an event coming up at the beginning of next year. I also got to translate a print newsletter design into a page design on the site.

I like variety. And I do get a variety of different things to work on in my new job. But it is not the same type of variety as I had when I was building a lot of different sites in a lot of different styles. I do miss that at times. So it has been an adjustment. I am realizing I need to look for opportunities to put my fingerprints more on the things that are given to me. I still have a lot of creative freedom. It just looks a bit different and I am still adjusting to that.

Different workflow

Another thing that is different and I am still trying to work out is the workflow between designers and myself. The previous front-end developer liked to do a lot more design than I have been doing over the past 15 years. He would like to get pieces and then figure out how to put them together. I have been use to have a designer mockup a site or a page for me and then try to carry out their vision while still taking some opportunities along the way to suggest and find new solutions that they might not have thought of.

One of the things I liked about attending the True Woman conference last week in Indianapolis is that I have an opportunity to meet many members of the design team in person for the first time. I spent quite a bit of time with Austin. At one point, we had a discussion about workflow. He expressed a willingness to adjust to my preferences that may be different than the previous developer. It was encouraging to have that conversation in person.

I am still thinking through a lot of this. I started out my career as a designer and developer. So I like the fact that I have more opportunities to design in this new role. But I also recognize that I have limitations in my design skills and at times it is better to involve a designer who is thinking about some of this stuff all the time. And sometimes, I have so much to think about on the development end that I don’t want to take on design tasks. So I am still thinking through this and expect to have more conversations in the months ahead.

Appreciation

I am extremely appreciative to have the opportunity that I have in this role. As I mentioned before, I was not certain that my next job would be in web development. I love front-end development. I love making an idea for a site or a page into reality. I like solving the problems of structure, styling, layout, and interactivity. I love bringing a design to life. I am so glad that I still get to do this.

I appreciate having a job again after a year of unemployment in a very difficult job market. And from what I hear, it is still very challenging. I don’t take for granted the opportunity that God blessed me with.

I also appreciate that I am involved in work that is meaningful to me. This really hit home for me when I was listening to a recent episode of One Footer in the Grave. Jon and Andy were talking about the privilege they have of taking on more work that is meaningful to them. I realize that not everyone has that privilege.

And I am not saying the work I was doing before wasn’t meaningful. But the work that I am doing now is closer to my heart because I believe the impact is further reaching than what I was doing before. It aligns more with my passions and what is valuable to me. It is making a difference and changing people’s lives. I am incredibly grateful to God for placing me here and for writing my story. It blows me away because I did not expect to be in ministry again.

International

One of the exciting opportunities for me is working with our many international teams. We have sites in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Afrikaan, and Farsi. I worked closely with Rachel on our French team as we recently migrated their site from WordPress into Django. I have also been working with our Farsi team to migrate their site from WordPress.

And in the process of working with the Farsi site, I have started using logical properties more in my work and also learned a lot about working with RTL sites. Ahmad Shadeed has a great resource, RTL Styling, that has been invaluable. He has also been gracious to answer several questions I had on Bluesky.

I have heart for international missions. I have spent several summers in Hungary and my wife and I lived there for a year. I have really enjoyed getting to work with the international teams and help them to further the mission to different parts of the world. I got to work with several of those teams recently when building out pages for the different livestreams (Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French) in other languages. It was fun to meet Rachel and others last week at the True Woman conference.

People

I am very grateful with the sharp and caring people that are my teammates at Revive Our Hearts. I have enjoyed getting to meet so many of them through our bi-weekly prayer times (we get split up in to small groups after larger group meeting on Zoom) or hearing their stories through our bi-weekly chapel times. And I got to meet many of them for the first time in person last week.

I love the team that I work with. I enjoyed getting to work with them in person last week at True Woman. I also got to spend a weekend with several of them in August when we attended Beer City Code conference. I have enjoyed getting to know them and to appreciate the different skills and strengths they bring.

I have also enjoyed having many spiritual conversations those that I work with. It is nice to talk about something that is so important to me and be encouraged by the different stories and faith lessons that they have learned.

This is probably not the article that I would have written back in June. I may have missed some of the lessons that I learned in the early days because they are not so fresh in my mind anymore. I feel like my feet are more under me these days and my confidence is building day by day. I am excited about what is ahead and look forward to continuing to share my journey through my weeknotes and other posts in the future.

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Footnotes

1 I have worked with WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, and Craft CMS in the past. WordPress is the CMS I have worked with the longest and am most familiar with. Craft CMS would be the second one I am most comfortable with.

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