Meet John Justice, Senior UI Developer. John has over 15 years of design experience working in a variety of industries including IoT, SaaS, Machine Learning, and AR. He learned the fundamentals of experience design through the Visual Communications program at the Herron School of Art and Design. His bigger picture thinking, focus on the end user, and speedy design skills always result in stellar experiences.
Q & A with John Justice
Q: What is your role at RocketBuild, and what does it entail?
A: I’m a Senior UI/UX Developer. I apply user-centric design principles on mobile and web applications to make kick-ass experiences with some of the smartest people in Indy.
Q: What three words might people use to describe you?
A: Creative. Insightful. Nerd.
Q: What got you into your career?
A: Developing websites for car dealerships and educational cartoon programs in high school
Q: Describe your educational experience?
A: I have always found that my education breaks down into thinking of people and their processes before deciding on technology to solve a problem. I learned the fundamentals of experience design through the Visual Communications program at the Herron School of Art and Design. I was taught the importance of being self-taught when it comes to technology since the landscape is ever-changing. Even today I am teaching myself new processes, frameworks, and tools to aid in the creation of products and services.
Q: Describe your professional experience?
A: Incredibly fortunate. I have been lucky enough to work with talented, kind people — even while handling large projects, tight deadlines, and building processes with little resources. Every teammate and client I have worked with has been friendly, passionate, and collaborative. I’ve always been lucky enough to transfer knowledge from each new project to the next. So far my professional experience has been mostly ups with few downs, and I’ve made sure never to leave a team or project on negative terms.
Q: What is your current favorite coding language or framework?
A: View.JS, Quasar Framework
Q: What’s your favorite type of project or client to work with?
A: Creative projects that break new ground in some way. Clients who are visionary and know their industry and customers well.
Q: What are you super passionate about?
A: Movies, food, and tech
Q: What do you do for fun?
A: I enjoy playing video games/board games, going on walks with my wife and our two dogs, and building Lego sets with my son and daughter. I also enjoy drawing, painting, and tinkering with game development tools like Unity and Unreal Engine.
Q: If you had to stay up all night for a hackathon, what drinks and snacks would you need to keep you going?
A: Tea, Earl Grey, hot
Q: Favorite local lunch spot?
A: Food trucks are great to go to — lots of different and fresh choices.
Q: Favorite band or artist?
A: I have a very eclectic collection of music that I tend to have playing on random. But when I really need to concentrate, I listen to film scores composed by John Williams.
Q: Favorite place you’ve ever visited?
A: Manhattan; it was great to walk around at 2am and see lots of activity with stores and restaurants still open.
Q: A fun fact about yourself?
A: I am terrible at bowling.
Q: A random fun fact?
A: The enterprise messaging app Slack has its origins in an online game called Glitch — developed by many of the same people. In fact, Slackbot stems from an NPC pet rock character that would onboard you through the game world much like Slackbot does when you first log in.
