success-story

Michele Memoli

Here's a list of things that I’ve accomplished recently, due entirely to your service: I'm now a WebStorm user – and prefer using it to a text editor. Our site has been completely rebuilt through what I've learn on egghead. Angular 1.0 and Webpack are a...

Here's a list of things that I’ve accomplished recently, due entirely to your service:

Very cool stuff.

Hi Michele, tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you and what do you do for fun?

I’m Michele (Mr), a 30 year-old and I live in London, UK.

I spend a lot of time writing code (mainly to prototype ideas) and the rest of my time is spent running a digital design agency – which is massively fun!

What do you do for a living and how long have you been in this industry?

Four years ago, my brother, and ex-colleague from the BBC and I set up a UX and design agency, called 100 Shapes.

We tend to work with broadcasters and large media organisations (it’s the world we’re most familiar with), either designing pilot projects or internal tools to help their staff do their jobs.

We have a full-time staff of five designers, but we sometimes get freelancers in to help ease the load.

What brought you to egghead in the first place?

I wanted to know code so that I could build things. Eventually, my team will be building, but I still want to understand how things work.

And right now it’s fun, so I spend my free-time learning.

I found the free Angular Companion guide on Amazon. I downloaded the ebook on my kindle, read it, wanted more, so I found the site.

I looked at the site, watched a few videos and that convinced me to upgrade. I haven’t looked back!

What are some big successes you’ve had recently?

Loads. Here are a few:

Webstorm

I was using Sublime. When I got it, I got it because everyone was saying how great it was. It was – the plugins made it support all kinds of languages and the git integration was super-useful.

However, as I watched more of the Angular videos, some were in WebStorm and I got a glimpse of the features.

Eventually I got a trial and was sold.

It’s a little annoying that I have to use an editor again to write Python (we tend to make quite a few Django projects), but fortunately a shift to Node has solved all that.

Rebuilding our site.

It’s true, our site was built using the recommended project layout from Kent C. Dodds. It’s on Github.

It’s a slight shame, because I think React would have been a better fit, but it wasn’t that difficult to do (once I’d watched the videos) and it felt very powerful at the time – we could build anything.

React

Lovin’ this right now. Especially Redux. I tried a few other Flux-esque libs first (Reflux, again because I saw it on egghead), but everything was using mixins and I wanted stick with ES6.

Webpack.

It was scary at first. Now, it’s a no-brainer. I’ve wired-it into my own flavour of a react-starter project.

ES6/2015/7

It’s been really easy to transition into TBH. egghead helped a lot. Now it’s all I do.

Making open-source apps

This was great fun. Because of the video series that Kent Dodds did on open-sourcing a lib, we actually followed his advice to create client libs for Climb.social (like react-climb-social).

Unit Tests

I learned lots about writing tests with Mocha and Chai.

The Geekiest Thing.

A couple weeks ago I set up some egghead videos on autoplay in a series on my phone which was casting to a TV.

What are you most excited about for your career in 2016?

We started a beta of Climb.social earlier this year – it’s a social media aggregation tool. i.e. it gathers all your social media in one place, so you can pick the best stuff to show. I’m excited to see where that goes in 2016.

My brother and I tend to create a “Christmas project” over the holiday period – usually a product idea or prototype. That could be something interesting we could come back to work with.

Other than that, buying a house? I saw that egghead has some videos on scraping (which I haven’t gotten around to watching yet), but I was thinking of writing something to scrape the real-estate agent sites together, so I don’t need to do lots of clicking around. It’d be great to bring it all into one place for me to look at!

Michele Memoli grew up in the south of the UK with his Italian family. He went off the University of Bristol to do get his MSci in Chemical Physics before moving to London and completely retraining with an MA of Interactive Media at the University of the Arts, London.

This mix of science and design got Michele his first job as a junior Interaction Designer at the BBC where he learned the UX craft – while he was there he worked on the user account system (BBC iD), BBC iPlayer and the BBC Homepage.

Michele left the BBC after two years and freelanced for a bit as a UX designer before eventually starting 100 Shapes with his brother and an ex-BBC colleague four years ago.

"I write in ES6 now."