April 13th, 2009

Highlight of the Week: Number 1: Jason Lengstorf

Every week we at DCTH are picking a #DCTH user at random to highlight. This is a easy way to give back to the community for being so supportive in DCTH and a way to bring more people together and learn who is behind the avatar.

Week One is Jason Lengstorf of Ennui Design


Jason, thanks for the interview tell everyone a brief summary of what you do:
I’m a PHP geek slash front-end designer based out of Missoula, MT. After about four years of moonlighting as a web developer, I finally had enough of a client base and enough confidence to quit my old day job, and now I work full-time for myself under the company name Ennui Design. I also run a blog off Ennui Design trying to share knowledge on PHP and jQuery. I’ve written for CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and a few others.

What brought you to DCTH?
I showed up at DCTH for the first time because I still hadn’t really grasped the point of Twitter, and I was trying to figure out what people saw in it. Someone mentioned that there was a meet-up for designers every Thursday, and I was online, so I hopped in. I traded some advice and left hooked on both Twitter and DCTH alike.

What brought you to twitter?
Curiosity, mostly. I heard about it a long time ago, and I didn’t take it very seriously. But I kept hearing about it. So I finally signed up, and now I’m hooked.

How vital is connecting with others in this field?
I’ve had so much great advice, writing opportunities, and general friendship come out of meeting other designers. I may have been able to get by and make a living without knowing other designers, but I probably would have lost my mind. My friends from around Missoula have no idea what the hell I’m talking about most of the time.


Why Design/Developing?
I played in a band for years, and while we were able to afford touring the western U.S., we couldn’t afford any professional design. I’d always had a thing for drawing, so I pirated a copy of Photoshop and gave it a try. I really like the art aspect, so when the band needed a website, I thought, “How hard could it be to make a website?” I built the first site in nothing but HTML, in tables, with iframes and everything. I probably rebuilt that site fifteen times, and I ended up with a fairly in-depth Flash site. That experience showed me how much fun web design could be, so I started doing it for other people. When I realized how much I hated maintaining sites, I decided to learn PHP to allow my clients to maintain their own sites. Out of that adventure, I ended up writing my own content management system, which I still use today (albeit heavily overhauled over the years).

What are some lessons you learned the hard way?
I don’t have any formal education, and I’ve never worked for a design company. I’ve never read a book on web design or development; everything I know is from reading the tutorials on w3schools.com and poring over the PHP manual and the blogosphere. Because of that, I missed a lot of best-practices. Everything I’d coded was from the hip, and a best guess on my part. I contacted Chris Coyier about writing an article for CSS-Tricks, which he was all for. I wrote an article called PHP for Beginners: Building Your First Simple CMS which I thought was a solid introduction to programming. However, the commenters pointed out security holes, and after the article hit the front page of Digg, people started exploiting the security holes so badly that Chris was forced to take down the demo. Seeing my programming torn apart like that was really hard, but it also inspired me to really pay attention to coding standards and security measures, which really shouldn’t be overlooked.

Freelance or Full-time?
I’m freelance. But I work enough that it might as well be full-time. :)

Where can you be found in the social media realm? (twitter, facebook, blog… shameless self promo ☺ )
I don’t do a lot of social media. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, and I run my blog at Ennui Design.

Any recent projects you want to show-off? (urls)

designers . highlights . twitter