Our Perficient colleagues share how they live and breathe our core values. Here, Ryan McCullough, a solutions architect, writes about his experiences working on innovative Adobe solutions with his Perficient Digital colleagues.
Innovation drives me. I’m a solutions architect with Perficient Digital’s Adobe practice and have embraced opportunities to work on cutting-edge projects.
My specialty is Single Page Application (SPA) integration within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). I recently played an integral role in innovating the way authors can interact with SPA-based components.
An Empty Canvas
The AEM platform is an open canvas. There isn’t much it can’t do if you keep an open mind and focus on a targeted solution. This makes it a breeding ground for new and exciting implementations.
Every project brings a new and unique problem to the table to solve. Adobe, and the AEM platform in particular, allow for such a great level of customizability that there can be endless unique implementations, all with satisfying unique, innovative requirements. On top of that, there are always new and improved integrations with other platforms and products.
Breaking New Ground
One project in particular I found incredibly bleeding-edge as it required a level of integration of a SPA into AEM that I had not seen before. It involved doing 1:1 components between the SPA framework, in this case React, and using Babel to transpile the application server-side, including any authored content. This was ground-breaking as in other SPA implementations these static, authored values would be consumed dynamically on the client side. (I wrote about the project in more detail at our Adobe blog.)
Sharing the Wealth
Once we pitched the concept internally, as well as to the client, there was immediate and strong support. I had all sorts of folks often checking in not only on the progress but also to pick my brain on the solution and how they could incorporate it into their projects.
I now bring a much deeper knowledge set of AEM and JavaScript than I used to have. As more and more clients are moving in this direction, having someone who understands both the front-end (JS) and back end (AEM) can reduce the amount of meetings required to architect the correct solution. Many of the ideas put in place for that client have been re-implemented for various other clients, saving them the need to start from scratch.
No Weak Links
I worked with an amazing Perficient Digital technical team. Our chain did not have a weak link. There is no way we could have accomplished what we did without each other. Of course, having a talented team also makes any project that much better.
Days Fly By
Without innovation, your development can be completed through good web searches. As a result, you will end up being less invested in the solution and, in reality, may not even understand why it works. With the more innovative solutions, the days seem like seconds. You’re creating new solutions, which force you to have an understanding of how and why a solution works as it does.
The concept of working on something that hadn’t been done (or at least successfully) before gave me such a greater sense of accomplishment.
Throughout 2018, we will be sharing our colleagues’ firsthand experiences with each of our core values and how they’re living and breathing them every day.
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