More About Me

My name is Julie Meloni, and I am lousy at talking about myself.

You can get the particulars about my work in general via my LinkedIn and Careers 2.0 profiles, and you’ll see that I’ve worked in all things web-enabled from almost the beginning of the web (yes, there was a time before it!). I’ve seen a lot of booms and busts, but I still think we have a long way to go before we’ve Built All the Things.

It’s true that I can build things, and I can build teams, and I can build teams who build things. My preference leans toward the latter these days, as I’m no longer the fastest coder in the west. Several years ago I made the conscious choice to move away from the hands-on building of things and into the architecting/direction/management side of things, because I thought (and still do) that I can provide more value to organizations by creating solid roadmaps and user stories, and UX and QA testing plans, and managing and mentoring groups of people than I could by simply being a single developer. While I’m not the faster coder in the west, I do think I’m the fastest blocker-clearer in the west, and that’s something.

I am of the Spolsky and Rands schools of thought and practice when it comes to building product, businesses, and teams. I’ll just say that, and let you go explore the vast publications of these two fellows on your own time, because it’s well worth it.

Although I’ve worked in web application development since 1994, I took a few breaks along the way—for instance, I took some time to warp young minds teach undergraduate courses in composition, technical and professional writing, literature, and digital technology and culture. Once upon a time I wrote some short-form stuff online; you might have seen some of my work in the late 90s version of Wired’s Webmonkey, or within the last few years at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker blog (here’s a list of the more interesting posts there). Over the years, I’ve also been writing the introductory-level books on web development that you can see on this web site (available in 18 languages, from Arabic to Chinese to Polish and just about everything in between).

These days, I spend most of my time working, very rarely blogging here (but I’d like that to change), and sometimes tweeting. I do spend a good deal of time on the StackExchange network, which I like very much. If it’s warm outside, you can bet I’ll either be camping or wanting to go camping.