Speaker Jacob Arriola on Flexbox and Changing Careers

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In today’s speaker interview we talk to Jacob Arriola, a front-end developer from Los Angeles who spends most of his time working with Sass, JavaScript and building custom WordPress themes.

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Jacob works with Zeek Interactive and is always trying to learn new languages and frameworks to deliver rich and engaging UI experiences.

What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?

I discovered tech/programming/dev work while in business school. I originally wanted to get into Corporate Finance, Mergers and Acquisitions or Private Equity; however, I found a passion for web dev and made a big change after graduate school, despite getting an MBA.

I’m a late bloomer into tech. Didn’t start until I was ~ 35.

 

 

What’s the language or framework you’re currently most excited about and why?

I’ve been learning EmberJS over the past 6 months. It excites me because of empowering me to build very rich UIs that aren’t server dependent (ie click on something then wait for the server to get back to you via a page refresh). And because Zeek builds a lot of APIs with WordPress for native iOS apps, I’ve been testing on building web apps that are stand alone JS applications that use WordPress as its API/data store. So in essence, we could have WordPress provide data for both a native iOS app and a web application powered by EmberJS.

What was your flexbox “aha” moment?

Vertical/horizontal centering, for sure. I would always find some hacky way to vertically center items and it never felt quite right, especially with fluid layouts and things moving all over the place.

Are there any scenarios that come to mind when flexbox would not be an appropriate solution?

Not really! The flexbox module provides developers with a toolset, so it’s up to the developer and project to determine fits. Despite that, use-cases are endless!

What’s one flexbox gotcha that flexbox beginners should avoid?

Browser support, for sure – especially dealing with IE 10 and 11. Most of the gotchas happen there. Phillip Walton has put together a great repo on issues and workarounds: https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs

Jacob will be speaking at length about Flexbox at WordCamp Los Angeles in the Blue Whale on Saturday, September 10 at 3:30pm