Adam Brock
クレイジー

Melbourne, Australia

I never save anything for the swim back.

Startup

After a decade of working in digital agencies, in December 2019 I left my full time day job as a lead front end developer and launched my first startup (just in time for a global pandemic), as a self-funded/solo founder, to automate time consuming jobs in design teams. I work on it ~10 hours a day, every day.

Talks

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

Bookshelf

I try to read 1-2 books per week; mostly non-fiction (philosophy, business, leadership, psychology, biographies), some fiction (novels, comics, manga) and occasionally a few things online.

These are some that I found worth reading or have read multiple times:

Non-fiction

Fiction

Online

Side Projects

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.

DesignOps Meetup (2018 - 2019)

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).

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 not the one it deserved.

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."

Agency Life (2010 - 2019)

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

Clients

I've spent 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

In my job, 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; 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 (with any of my support that they need).

Anti-(fr)agile

I'm opposed to the perversion of "Agile" (Scrum) that has been mindlessly adopted in many agencies now. Whenever 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, AWS, Electron, Firebase, Vuepress, Gridsome, Yeoman, Figma, Contentful and Craft CMS.

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

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

Portfolio (2010 - 2019)

I've delivered hundreds of projects over the last decade; many that I've forgotten, many under NDA that I can never share, but all have collectively granted me exposure to a broad range of experiences, skills and teams. Listed below are a handful that are each memorable for their own reasons:

Nike Augmented Reality Air Max Day App (Tundra)

To help launch the Air Max 270; true to Nike deadlines, I had 8 days to build a an augmented reality web app which featured 5 different moments that could be disovered by any of the 500 guests at the event. By loading the website on your phone and pointing the camera at certain posters, you would see floating milk bottles, self-inflating Air Max balloon letters, running rabbits or floating/inflating air units from the sneakers. The app also allowed you to take and save photos or video of what you were seeing in augmented reality to share later.

Hairhouse Design System/Front End Build (Tundra)

Hairhouse Warehouse underwent a rebrand, which involved a complete redesign of their website. I rebuilt the front end by creating a design system where the codebase itself served as the single source of truth for both the designers and developers. Using the design system, I composed everything together into a complete front end build of the site. The neat part was that all of the developer documentation, the component library site and the Sketch libaries (using html-sketchapp) were regenerated each time a code update was deployed to production.

Nike T-Shirt/Jersey/Bra Customisation Apps (Tundra)

I built a web app so customers could customise their Nike apparel using an iPad at different events. I added automated email and SMS notifications to update customers and a live stock tracking/order admin area for the staff who were handling the orders to use. The core app has been repurposed/rebranded half a dozen times for different events, campaigns and products.

Nike Women's 21k Marathon (Tundra)

Interfacing with commercial RFID readers, I built an app using web sockets that read data from the runner's bibs (which had an NFC chip inside) and sent it to the pacer's phones so they could provide personalised encouragement during difficult parts of the run. I also used the data to help render/send out personalised videos (with footage of them crossing the finish line) to each of the 1,200 particpants a few hours after the event.

Yume Marketplace Platform (Tundra)

Yume is a startup that connects suppliers of wholesale food that would normally be thrown out with buyers who would like to purchase it at heavily discounted rates. I worked on the front end and back end for launching the MVP, which was built in 6 weeks with one other dedicated back end developer.

Nike NTC Tour Event (Tundra)

We built a registraition site for 3,000+ people to sign up with their friends for the Nike+ Training Club event in Melbourne and Sydney. After the registration phase, I built a website for the event day, with personlised maps and details about the trainers and schedule for the day. The previous year, the site went down due to getting too much traffic, so I built my own static site generator and deployed flat HTML to Amazon S3 with CloudFront. We had 17,000+ page views on the day. I also built a real-time Instagram feed that displayed photos from a certain hashtag on a gigantic screen at the events.

Officeworks Point of Sale System Front End (Tundra)

The Officeworks team built their own custom POS software over the course of a few years with a dedicated back end developer team. Unfortunately, the front end was a bit of a mess, so I spent 4 weeks on-site refactoring everything into a proper design system with build tooling to make it more consistent and maintainable in the future.

Honda Website Rebuild (Leo Burnett)

I was one of two front end developers who helped "lift and shift" (complete rebuild) the Honda Australia website over to AEM, with a team of gun-for-hire back end developers, consultants and scrum masters. It was Looney Tunes. Their previous agency said it would take 12 months; we went from zero to live in 3 months.

Peter's Ice Cream "Month of Mantras" Campaign (Leo Burnett)

To help relaunch the Skinny Cow brand of ice-creams, I built a website that let users submit their own personal mantra onto a real-time public gallery within the landing page, which created personalied sharable images with their text written in a hand-painted font over a textured background. Each day, one mantra was selected to be hand painted, framed and delivered to the winner who submitted it.

Victoria University "Work Experience of a Lifetime" Campaign (Leo Burnett)

I developed a website that allowed high school students to enter the chance to win work experience at one of half a dozen great companies in Melbourne. The project recevied an honorable mention (2nd place) for Awwwards "site of the day" (losing out to "The Hunger Games", who launched on the same day).

Peter's Ice Cream Maxibon "Hangryman" Campaign (Leo Burnett)

We ran a campaign where you would be sent a free eski that could be worn around your belt (big enough to hold two ice creams) if you submitted a photo of yourself "smashing" a Maxibon (eating it really fast). I built a Facebook app that allowed people to enter the competition by uploading their photo and liking the page.

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 also became increasingly interested in teams, business and leadership over the last few years, and applied 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, 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.

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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