I made a New Year’s resolution this year to learn a new thing every month. It’s been going great so far. I have taken classes and immersed myself in everything from public speaking to playing guitar, brewing beer to surfing.
I enjoy learning new things, and not just in my personal life. I’m fortunate that my job as a lead technical consultant at Perficient Digital affords me endless opportunities to grow as a professional as well. It makes my job more exciting every day.
What I Do at Perficient Digital
I am an Adobe-certified architect in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). I travel and consult for clients that implement Adobe marketing solutions. I help clients understand Adobe digital-marketing products (like AEM, Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Audience Manager). I also design technical solutions, lead technical scrum teams, develop websites and services, facilitate technical requirements, and communicate with business stakeholders to understand business requirements, control code quality, and technical strategies for the teams.
An AEM meetup I attended at Adobe’s San Francisco office
My Biggest Source of Pride
I have been working on Adobe marketing solutions for more than five years. As an Adobe-certified expert, I’ve become a “go-to” Adobe solutions expert for our clients. I help teams understand, implement, and build solutions on Adobe platforms. I’m proud of my role because I genuinely like helping people, businesses, and communities.
There’s a quote I find to be very true: “The more you do, the better you become.” I am grateful that I get to write codes and develop exciting web pages and applications – all while keeping in touch with the latest technologies. I love seeing the websites we build for clients go live and visible to the public. It feels good to see the work completed.
The Most Notable Project of My Career
Perficient Digital has a lot well-known, big-brand clients, and it’s exciting to work with these brands. I’m currently involved in one of the most notable projects of my professional life. It’s the longest and largest project I’ve ever been on.
When our client started a major initiative to migrate to and implement Adobe marketing solutions, they had 18 scrum teams building on the same project. I was part of the team during the early phase, and we have gone through four successful releases.
The complexity of the project centers on the need to talk to many data sources, servers, and services in the company. We integrated many front-end technologies in AEM like Single Page Application. We imported and updated data from the existing database to AEM.
Besides development, our client has well-organized product management, release management, code deployment and server deployment teams. I’ve learned a lot about the continuous integration process, code-branching and deployment strategy, and release management for major enterprises.
At a San Francisco Giants game with my colleagues
What It’s Like to Work with My Team…
Working in our Adobe practice has been a great journey. We have a team of Adobe-certified business practitioners, developers, and architects in multiple Adobe marketing solutions domains. We chat a lot in our Slack channels. We greet each other in the morning, post funny memes, talk about hobbies outside of work, and help each other by posting and answering questions.
We have truly talented and good people on our team that I am thankful for. I haven’t had an unpleasant experience working with any of my colleagues.
…and My Team Leaders
I think leadership and culture are very important for a company to attract and maintain talent. Perficient has great leaders. I really appreciate their mentorship and management. Even though we don’t talk every day, they don’t forget me. They don’t forget what we’ve talked about previously. I can count on them for my career development. They give me great counseling. They also see my performance and effort in my job. I have never felt that my hard work is not visible to our leadership.
Me at Yosemite National Park this year
How I’m Growing My Skills – and Becoming a Thought Leader
I write for our Adobe blog (you can read my posts here) and do coding around AEM and other Adobe digital marketing solutions. It’s a great way to share my thoughts and discoveries and contribute to the Adobe community.
Perficient is one of only six worldwide Adobe Premier partners. As such, I recently had the opportunity to represent our company and attend several Adobe partner events in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. I took part in the first-ever Adobe Digital Marketing Masters Workshop at Adobe’s San Francisco office. The five-day workshop expanded my knowledge base on Adobe Experience Cloud products and gave me a more holistic view of Adobe’s marketing solutions.
I also mentor junior developers in our Adobe practice and assist in building internal projects. I help recruit and interview new developers for the practice as well.
Attending a multicultural event with colleagues
How – and Where – I Get My Work Done
I like the flexibility of working from the client site, the Perficient office, or my home when needed. I also like the flexible hours. As a consultant, I can work from home, a coffee shop or airport, and I am not bound to the traditional 9-to-5 workday, as long as I am productive and there when my team needs me. I have great self-management skills. If I commit to finishing something by a certain time, I plan accordingly to finish and deliver great work.
A visit to the Golden Gate Bridge
My Life Outside of Work
I love exploring San Francisco. I enjoy hanging out in coffee shops, walking around nice neighborhoods, sitting in parks, relaxing at the waterfront or visiting a museum. I like food and wine a lot, and being in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s amazing. There are tons of good restaurant and wineries I can go to.
I like to stay active as well. It helps me focus and release stress. I like badminton, ping pong, going to the gym, hiking, running and walking in nature.
Another thing I love about living in San Francisco Bay Area is that there are many meetup events and free coding classes. They are good resources to explore a new area, learn and improve your skills, and meet new people with same interests. I have attended several of them, and I am looking forward to more exciting new ways to grow in my personal and professional lives.
