Adam Brock
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Senior Front End Developer, Melbourne

What's that? You're looking for a developer who likes to play it safe? Someone who never tries anything new? This isn't for you... comfort is the killer of creativity.

I never save anything for the swim back.

Jump to —

Work

I've been working in digital agencies for the last decade. Previously at Leo Burnett, now happily at Tundra. I can't even imagine ever taking the one-way ticket to a retirement village client side.

These days, I'm fortunate to spend lots of my time working with Nike, but I've also done a bunch of work with Honda, Officeworks, Australia Post, Peters Ice-Cream and many others.

I care about integrity, simplicity and design systems to build performant websites/applications that are accessible and responsive to everyone on any device.

I love cultivating and leading small teams of smart creatives (A-players); taking a simple approach that if you hire really great people (who are smarter than you), give them interesting problems to solve and freedom to work out how, they will do amazing work.

I'm not a fan of the perverted diaster that "Agile" (Scrum) has become in agencies, and I look forward to its inevitable demise once everyone wakes up from the groupthink nightmare. PROTIP: No one actually doing the work on your team likes it. It's a zero sum game.

Things I enjoy using to solve problems

Sass, Javascript (ES6), Node.js, Vue.js, Electron, Socket.IO, SVG, Webpack, AWS, Hugo, Serverless, Docker, Netlify, Yeoman, Figma, and Craft CMS.

Things I would rather eat glass than touch (again)

AEM, Sitecore, Salesforce, Pardot, Magento or Drupal.

DesignOps

I run DesignOps — The most dangerous design meetup in Melbourne — with Ch'an Armstrong. It's an unscripted variety show inspired by The Matrix and old-school hip hop, where we believe the distance between design and development should be zero.

The only thing we love more than receving hatemail and having people tell us how we should run our own meetup is the wonderful following of die hard fans (and fans of Die Hard) that support us in everything we do <3.

For some reason, I also perform live raps at our events; the fans demand it (they don't).

Talks

I've given a few talks about topics related to DesignOps and thinking about the future, including:

Side Projects

Figmatic

I built Figmatic after talking to my design team and telling them we should be able to build production ready HTML banners from Figma designs with one click.

Digital Agency

Because all job ads are the same, I created a fake agency, Digital Agency, as an elaborate way to recruit smart creatives who worship at the altar of fun.

Death by Meeting

I don't like wasting time or souless meetings, so I built a web app called Death by Meeting to track both.

Me

I spent the first 5 years of my career as a self-taught web designer/developer, and the last 5 years focused on front end development, after realising design and front end would eventually become the same thing.

I like to read books — mostly business, leadership, psychology, biographies and stoic philosophy.

While I'm working, music keeps me going — I enjoy extreme (death/black/thrash) metal the most, but also into old-school hip hop, prog rock, jazz and classical.

Outside work, I love watching films — from directors like Wong Kar-Wei, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Michael Haneke, Hayao Miyazaki, Quentin Tarantino, Sion Sono, Lars Von Trier, Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki‑duk, Akira Kurosawa, Paolo Sorrentino and dozens more.

Bookshelf

I try to read 1-2 books per week; some that I really like or have read multiple times include:

Contact

Not on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter — but you can be creepy and stalk me on LinkedIn if you really want to.

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