Justin Coleman

About Me

Currently I live and work in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am working remotely for Cyren, a cloud-based cybersecurity company. At Cyren I am a part of the relatively new Digital Studio. As the senior front-end developer on the team I am responsible for most development tasks on the marketing websites and emails. I also create a lot of the structural infrastructure the team uses. I have refined processes and implemened tools and methods which help us work faster and more seamlessly.

Outside of work I like to spend my free time working with friends on exploring new opportunities to see what we can build and put out into the world. So far these experiments have led to things like Thought Drop, Lanky Living and Quote Roper. It's a great way to scratch my entrepreneurial itch while also continuing to level up my front-end abilities.

In addition to work and my entrepreneurial activities I enjoy a variety of other things including travelling with my wonderful girlfriend, spending way too much time at the movies, watching sports (Go Dodgers/Eagles/Lakers/Longhorns!) and taking my dogs on long walks.

About My Tools

Inspired by Wes Bos and uses.tech I decided to semi-thoroughly outline my home desk setup below.

Hardware

I work exclusively on a Late-2016 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD (supplemented by an external 1TB SSD). It's a good machine that has served me well but I am planning to upgrade to a 16-inch M1(X?) MacBook Pro whenever that becomes available.

Now that I am working 100% remotely I had to upgrade my WFH setup. I went with a sit-stand desk from Autonomous and a Herman Miller Embody chair.

I run my MacBook in clamshell mode. It sits out of site and is connected to a CalDigit TS3+ dock with one cable going from the dock to the computer. I use dual 27-inch 4K monitors from Dell on a VESA mount. My input devices are the Logitech MX Keys (with palm rest) and the MX Master 3.

Development

I use VS Code for my editor (with the wonderful Operator Mono and Cobolt 2 theme), iTerm 2 and Transmit (for FTP and S3). I also tend to keep xScope open to make sure things are lined up just perfectly.

For documentation of any variety I have found Dash indispensable. The ability to store all of the docs you use most frequently locally on your machine is great.

Design

Any time I need to design something I jump straight into Sketch which is, in my opinion, the best tool out right now for creating for mobile and the web. And if you are using Sketch then you also need to install Sketch Toolbox ASAP.

When I need to create a wireframe for something I use Balsamiq which seems like a pretty standard choice at the moment. For anything color related I rely on ColourLovers and the Mac app Couleurs.

Other Stuff

These are other tools/services/apps I use most frequently on my machines, either for work or for fun: Github (for fun), BitBucket (for work), Tweetbot, Slack, Viscosity (for VPNing) and Flux (to keep my eyes going).

About This Website

This website was built with React (because why not?). The CSS started out as Sass (SCSS to be specific). Both of those plus the JavaScript were compiled and compressed using my Gulp build script. That same script also optimizes any images used on the site. You can find my Gulpfile on Github. Feel free to use it and modify it suit your needs.

I followed the BEM methodology when writing my HTML and CSS in order to try and keep things modular and understandable going forward. If you look through my source code you will see lots of classes and lots of hyphens and underscores, a telltale sign of BEM. An example would be:

The only code I didn't write myself for this website was provided by the following wonderful people:

• React

The fonts used here are Open Sans via Google Fonts and Future. My domain was purchased using NameCheap.com whom I highly recommend and it is hosted on Netlify using an automated build from a Github repo.