Adam Brock
クレイジー

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.

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Work

I've been working in digital agencies for the last decade. Previously at Leo Burnett, currently at Tundra. I will never take the one-way ticket to a retirement village client side.

Clients

These days, I'm fortunate to spend most 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 other accounts.

Values

I value integrity, simplicity and good design to build fast websites and applications that are useful, accessible and responsive to everyone on any device.

Building teams

I love cultivating and leading small teams of smart creatives (A-players); taking a simple approach of hiring really great people (who are smarter than me), giving them interesting problems to solve, long uninterrupted blocks of time and the freedom to work out how — which leads to fulfilling/amazing work.

Anti-(fr)agile

I'm opposed to the perversion of "Agile" (Scrum) that has been mindlessly adopted in many agencies and companies. When I feel alone, I remind myself that Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler (two of the original contributors to the manifesto) share my position.

Some things I enjoy using to solve problems

Javascript, Node.js, Sass, Vue.js, Netlify, Electron, Firebase, Vuepress, Gridsome, Serverless, Yeoman, Figma, Contentful and Craft CMS.

Things I would rather eat glass than work with (again)

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

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.

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

Heat

On March 21st 2019, I made the decision to stop co-running and creatively contributing to DesignOps Melbourne, after spending the previous year helping to build it from less than 200 members to 1,100+ members with sold out events. It was the meetup this town needed, but clearly not the one it deserved (or wanted).

Unfortunately, the future of the meetup and the future of my own integrity had become mutually exclusive.

As I wrote in my LinkedIn post; "When uniformity of thought becomes popular in a wider community, it’s either due to reaching absolute truths, or reaching an incredible level of conformity. I believe that we’re surrounded by the latter; and I won’t entertain the idea of adopting any groupthink directives that I don’t agree with, in order to satisfy the madness of crowds."

Talks

I've given a few talks on DesignOps and my thoughts about the future of design and development, including:

Projects

Figmatic

I built Figmatic after talking to my design team and realising that I 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 soon be the same role.

I've also become increasingly interested in teams, business/companies and leadership over the last few years, and applying the learnings into my team.

While I'm working, music keeps me focused; I enjoy extreme metal (death/black/thrash) the most, but I'm also into old-school hip hop, progressive rock, classical, soundtracks and other genres.

Outside work, I love watching films from directors like Wong Kar-Wei, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, 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.

I spend lots of my time reading books.

Bookshelf

I try to read 1-2 books per week; mostly non-fiction (philosophy, business, leadership, psychology, biographies) and some fiction. These are some that I found worth reading or have read multiple times:

Non-fiction

Fiction

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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