This month Ian Ainley nailed it.
Working with someone is a huge commitment. You spend hundreds of hours collaborating, debating, struggling, and eventually succeeding alongside your peers. Trust is an inherent part of any relationship, and getting into the virtual trenches with someone requires a great deal of it. My working relationship with Ian has spanned multiple companies and countless projects. There is no developer I would rather have at the keys than Ian Ainley. He is a superb programmer, but more importantly is dependable, and trustworthy. There is calmness to his swagger that helps to right the boat when things get rough, and I have never seen a task or impasse get the best of him.
Ian’s work is uniformly accurate and timely. On a project that was particularly complex – Ian built the front end for something called “Blue Wall”. This ‘wall’ integrated a live twitter stream using web sockets to display tweets on a full screen map. The user then interacted with the map using motion captured by an X-Box Connect. Ian hand rolled a custom event dispatch system in CoffeeScript to handle the incoming tweets and motion events into what is truly fun and exciting user experience.
Most recently we have been working on a mobile app using the Sencha Touch framework, and Phonegap(Cordova). This is an area of JavaScript development that has become an increasingly popular option for clients who wish to have their “app” deployed to multiple platforms’ App Stores but don’t want the overhead of developing and maintaining a codebase for each platform. There are many benefits to going the way of the HTML5/JS/CSS3 to native deployment. In this solution there are of course hurdles and roadblocks that developers must face to achieve the same level of immersion and integration that a native app can provide. In my experience as a Web Developer this has been one of the more challenging problems faced. Thankfully Bootsoft is lucky enough to have Ian Ainley tackling these issues and managing the find the right balance between art and code.
These are only a couple of the projects Mr Ainley has been working on, and there is no question that he has Nailed It.