About Jess Chadwick
Hi, my name is Jess Chadwick and I'm the Webinary here at Infragistics. "Webinary!?" you say? Well, like the rest of my buddies in the User Experience Guidance group, I'm not too eager to share my "official" title, and have tried to come up with a clever portmanteau instead. This particular one breaks down to "Web Luminary" - I strive to be a guiding light in web development and design (certainly not graphical design - I'm somewhat "graphically disabled", but luckily we've got our intensely talented Visual Design Group here to make up for any shortcomings in that area).
My Life at Infragistics
I joined the company back in May of 2006 as a part of the Internal Systems group, and then moved over to the newly formed User Experience Guidance group towards the end of that same year. My first project with UxG was helping to completely revamp our main online web presence, www.infragistics.com. It definitely wasn't a small task, but we had lots of great minds working together, and I think the finished product is one of the best sites I've seen in a long time... and that was just the first release! The project is still very much alive and growing, and a majority of my efforts here continue to focus on constantly improving it.
Just days after our initial release of the updated website came the opening of our new offices in Tokyo, Japan. This plunged me into a world of localization and internationalization that I had never before really been exposed to. I mean, we've all heard of localization and strive to make our applications support it (right?... right??), but I'd never before been so involved in actually doing it. Well, luckily the requirements for the recent revamping of this website had kept this in mind and the update was relatively painless. For the most part, it was just a few code changes here and there and a large coordination effort with the team in Japan cranking out the translated content. Within a few weeks, we were done, and the folks in Japan now had a site that they can comfortably navigate in their own language. Interestingly enough, there is a unique, strangely satisfying feeling you get seeing your code and design in another language, even if you don't have any idea how to read it!
The interesting projects continue to roll in, and continue to provide one exciting challenge after another! All-in-all, it's been a great ride and continues to get better!
My Life Before Infragistics
My lifetime of coding all started with a small QBASIC RPG game I made when I was 12. The minute I saw the computer doing something that I had told it to do, I was hooked... and it all snow-balled from there. I began adding one language after another - Visual Basic, C++, Perl, PHP, Java. Then I joined the workforce via a paid Java co-op in college and never looked back. Since then I've worked with quite a few different technologies at various companies ranging from a large mortgage company to a few small start-ups. Somewhere in there, Microsoft announced the .NET Platform, including its new language, C#. I bought an early book on the language and said, "Hey - I know this! It's Java... only better!" I naturally transitioned from Java/JSP to C#/ASP.NET and continued my on-going quest to learn as much as could about this great platform and language.
My Life Outside of Infragistics
I've just got to come out and admit it - I'm definitely a geek. And, as a geek, my "life" outside of Infragistics largely resembles my life inside of Infragistics, only I have a lot more say over the projects I work on. My main passion is hacking around inside my various Linux+Open Source systems; I always joke about how Microsoft technologies fund my Open Source personal life. You can usually find me tweaking some piece of software here or there or keeping up with the latest release of some application. In short, I love working with computers and the more technical, the better.
Though 100% geek, I do have some saving graces that keep me from being an absolute recluse. I recently married the love of my life, and we live in a great home in Ewing, NJ which I treat much like my computers - constantly tinkering with something and feeling the need to upgrade often (though you wouldn't know it from the height of my grass...). I'm also an avid animal lover, and spend many hours a day either playing with, training, or otherwise doting on my 4 year-old black lab. Then, after the sun has gone down and both my wife and dog are fast asleep, I log on to Xbox Live for a rousing multiplayer online battle of Halo 2, Rainbox Six: Vegas, or Gears of War (my gamer tag is Laggy_McGee you care to join in!). Lastly, anytime I can fit them in, I try to find the closest (non-virtual!) poker table for a little bit of Texas Hold 'Em, or when I get a free weekend I do anything I can to strap on some SCUBA gear and jump into the water. Unfortunately, the Atlantic Ocean off of New Jersey is as clear as clam chowder - and almost as interesting - so the diving often has to wait until vacation when I can get myself to some exotic destination such as Aruba or Grand Cayman where you can really see the ocean floor.