Ryan Stephenson
“If you want to stick with a comfortable technology, accept fate as a cube dweller to supporting legacy systems.”
Ryan Stephenson | Vice President, Technology
When the first graphical browser, Mosaic, first appeared in the early 90s, Ryan’s innate curiosity was piqued and he started experimenting with the web.
It is this curiosity that Ryan brings to the Infuz mission of developing compelling interactive experiences. As head of R&D and the development team, he is constantly pushing to improve software solutions to support better user experiences. Ryan is also actively designing reusable, extendable platforms so that infūz can efficiently create better interactive experiences for our clients.
Ryan is an avid cyclist, or he was before his first child was born.
Given your time involved with all of this, It’s hard to imagine compiling a complete retrospective of the things you have seen change at the hand of digital and interactive- speaking to marketing specifically. It may be easier to answer the question: what have we learned from the past 5 to 10 years? And regarding future capabilities is there anything not possible?
I’ve learned that awareness of the constantly changing industry either depresses or excites, I don’t see an in-between. If you want to stick with a comfortable technology, accept fate as a cube dweller to supporting legacy systems. Otherwise, find the right channels to stay connected, always learning, always building; even if a project never sees the light of day, but you get incredible feedback when it does. Some past practices extend to the next model, some require re-invention, but adapting is always required, and that acceptance provides its own zen-like calm when everything is different again.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Latest shiny thing, new tech, doesn’t matter. If you don’t have a goal serving both creator and user, attention is misguided. However, the shiny are distracting for a reason; if it fits the cause, make it happen. Better yet, invent the shiny thing. Often, mastering existing technology serves to execute an idea; when you can create something new to support the new ideas, then you’ve got something really worth bragging about.
Can’t underestimate the audience that doesn’t stay as current or connected as the young or tech-savvy. Creating content accessible to all, including the robots among us, may be the priority over implementing some new model for interaction, requiring the latest version of a framework, or building for a new platform. The fun part comes when they’re all a priority.
Not possible? Yesterday, future-me was due back with an answer to this question, my time-machine, and a few projects I still want to finish. And start. It’d be awesome for those aggressive timelines.
Also, I haven’t found a practical way to eliminate comment trolls from the internet.
You have what seems to be a difficult daily task of keeping a team of developers together and (relatively speaking) sane, considering the stress and headaches that go into development, testing, and ultimately “making things work”. What do you attribute to you and your team’s ability to keep everyone and everything moving forward together, even during at times when it may seem no end is in sight?
Every developer is driven to solve the problem, whatever form that takes. Even when schedules make it difficult, our team fights to deliver that solid product. Knowing the futility accounting for “everything”, projects are also configured to “phone home” should the unexpected occur, offering more insight in how to anticipate the next surprise.
Juggling projects and tasks is an aspect of a small biz, the multi-taskers that really excel.
Most are wise enough to never say “I’ll know it when I see it” within earshot of a developer with a non-trivial implementation.
Flexible schedules, accessible caffeine, and pinball tables don’t hurt either.
In the past year, Infuz has begun to transition more and more internal ideas and projects into actual products and services – useful to not only consumers, but also brands looking to reach their audiences in ways that haven’t been able to before. How is the development process different when building these ideas and products, and does the freedom involved with starting from the ground up intimidate or excite your team even more?
There’s a more personal investment in growing and evolving internal projects into their own product, and the most difficult part is settling on when to stop revising. Client work will have a specific audience, and we’re careful as an agency to design for that. Internal projects are for “us”, and there’s a lot of personal attention that attracts.
Traditional service projects come with a client with expectations to meet, so a check-list of sorts is understood, and there’s a comfort working against that. Internal projects can start as a cool idea without constraints, and finding the balance between satisfying every participant as a stakeholder, and actually getting to build it can be challenging.
