Web Development

21 Be Born Again

Rodney Urquhart grew up in a North Philly neighborhood ridden with gang violence and effects of the crack epidemic. After seeing people around him get involved with gangs and crime, he realized that staying in high school would result in getting arrested or shot. 

At 16, Rodney dropped out of high school and moved in with his grand mother. Being a high school dropout and having no college degree, Rodney had his fair share of companies casting doubt on his ability. But his willingness to learn and work well with others was what got him to create an impressive company portfolio including Comcast, Microsoft’s Yammer, and ThoughtWorks. He didn’t just want to survive, he wanted to thrive. 

Rodney currently heads the test infrastructure team at Slack. He is also part of a program called /dev/color, a non-profit organization that aims to maximize the impact of Black software engineers in the tech space.

#28: Rodney Urquhart - How a 16-year-old High School Dropout became a Software Engineer at Slack

In this episode of the Versioning Show, David and Tim are joined by Chris Ward, a technical writer, blogger and web developer. They discuss a wider interpretation of responsive web design that includes user context, push notifications, future devices and accessiblity. They also discuss mobile first and progressive enhancement, tech journalism, the art of documentation, working with Drupal, PHP (and whether it will ever be cool again), and using Wikipedia to learn how to perform an appendectomy.

Show Notes:

- Chris Ward on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisChinch
- Chris' Gregarious Mammal site: https://www.gregariousmammal.com
- Jump Start Responsive Web Design, 2nd Edition: https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/books/jump-start-responsive-web-design-2nd-edition
- Hampton Catlin interview: https://www.sitepoint.com/versioning-show-episode-18-with-hampton-catlin/
- View a transcript of this episode here: https://www.sitepoint.com/taking-responsive-web-design-beyond-the-visual#transcript
- Visit the Versioning Show home page: https://www.sitepoint.com/versioning-show/

Say hello on Twitter: 
- M. David Green: twitter.com/mdavidgreen
- Tim Evko: twitter.com/tevko
- Versioning Show: twitter.com/versioningshow
- SitePoint: twitter.com/sitepointdotcom

The Versioning Show

Taking Responsive Web Design Beyond the Visual, with Chris Ward

Self-described nerd with an Internet connection

Taking Responsive Web Design Beyond the Visual, with Chris Ward

SitePoint

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