Keefr.com’s posts typically surround sharing different articles about specific in acronyms like CSS and HTML, along with jQuery and other web development / front end development pieces I’ve found and think are beneficial for sharing and things I’d like to explore and utilize in future web projects.

But this post is different — sill related to web development, but it’s more about my career and the company I work for.

A few years back, I left Centerline Digital to pursue another position that allowed me some professional growth on the management front. I’ve never wanted to fully get out of development, but also wanted to get into managing a development team. That didn’t really happen in that position and things went south.

My next position, I did get more of the leadership role and managed my own small team on a day-to-day basis. This was my first time both hiring team members and running a department. In the past, my management experience was limited to being the lead on specific development projects. So while it was empowering to run a small department and have that responsibility, it was in search engine optimization and involved a majority of time in meetings, and very little time in the code.

Then just over year ago, things started to really fall into place. Through a past colleague, I was able to get back into a true design agency, Clean Design — one of the good ones. It was obvious that they value design and wanted to bring a developer in to slowly start an in-house development department. Expectations were set from the beginning that while I enjoyed the development, I was also looking for more. It fit what they were looking for for the future as well.

Now a little over a year later, Clean Design is continuing to grow, bringing on new business and I’m over capacity. We interviewed multiple candidates this week for another developer under me and the whole interview team really liked one candidate. Today, that candidate verbally accepted.

It seemed almost too easy. For the first time in Clean Design’s history, there will be a development team. I’ll be overseeing another full-time employee and will continue to manage any outsourced projects, though the hope is to keep it in house as much as possible.

I’ve spent time over the past week planning organizational tools, hardware, software and development tools and it’s exciting to start working through some of that in practice, rather than in theory. I pride myself on being able to teach and am looking forward to helping a fellow front end developer start their career on the right foot.

I’m hoping the young / growing Clean Design development team will be as exciting for this new candidate as it is for me — getting to start to build and shape the projects, procedures, tools, etc. is very satisfying and stimulating. I got a bit of exposure to doing it at Centerline Digital, but this will be at a whole new level of my personal involvement and responsibility.

Here’s to continuing to grow Clean Design, its development team and its capabilities.