Sandra Dumas is not only a Brightfind Front-End Developer, she is a developed person, and she develops everything she does to the utmost degree imaginable. What does that mean? Well, Sandra plays electric guitar in a band, and . . . are you ready? She makes the guitars herself. She does everything from carving the wood to fitting and customizing the electronics.
Puzzle Solving as a Career
She brings that same fullness of process to her work at Brightfind. “Well, I enjoy puzzle-solving,” says Sandra. “Knowing where you want to go and figuring out how to get there.” She loves nothing more than to get her hands on a wireframe and strategize the best way to make it come to life, the best way to turn it into a functional prototype with all the moving parts. She loves to meet the challenge she always sets for herself: “Can I do this better than the last project?”
Life Before Front-End Development
Sandra has worked for Brightfind for over 15 years. But she wasn’t always a developer. “I spent about five years as the director of an art gallery,” said Sandra. “And during that time, the Internet really took off and became a part of peoples’ everyday lives. I was fascinated by it, especially the hardware, at first.” Not surprisingly, she even built her own computer.
Then Sandra started getting interested in design. She built a website for her friend’s realty business, and then another website for another friend, and then realized it was time to change professions.
Creative Meets Technical
As a member of Brightfind’s front-end team, the visual skills that Sandra brings, her visual organization and visual sense of what works, are extremely important, but Sandra has to know how things work from the back-end as well. “We take requirements regarding design and functionality and make them work in code. Here at Brightfind, my job is more of a design, technical job. I am in-between creative and technical. It’s perfect for me.”
For Sandra, part of her job as developer is to educate clients about trends. She doesn’t want any clients to miss out on possibilities just because they aren’t aware of them. For example, she always develops for responsive design, even if the client isn’t aware of its importance. “Responsive design used to be such a big deal,” said Sandra. In fact, she describes her first responsive design project as her most challenging. “Even though it was only four years ago, our first fully responsive website was a big shift in the way we did things. Now it’s the norm.”
Team Collaboration
As creative and technically astute as Sandra is, she sees herself in the context of the larger Brightfind team. “It’s a completely synergistic environment,” she explains. “Everyone here is passionate about what they do. We are always sharing blogs and books, and any new information we can get our hands on. My team is why I keep getting better at what I do.”
Sandra loves the diversity of the Brightfind team, and all that its members bring to the table in terms of knowledge, skill, and excitement. “And management is very supportive of our professional development,” said Sandra. “All these things make Brightfind a great place to work.”
Maybe that’s why Sandra’s favorite project was developing Brightfind’s website when the company launched in March 2015. “It was very collaborative with the front end team,” she said. “Usually we don’t get to work together as much because we are all on different projects.”
Sandra wants to see Brightfind expand to different areas and audiences, and to fully develop its great potential as a web design and development agency. She imagines Brightfind developing to the utmost degree imaginable, just like Sandra herself, the highly developed person who Brightfind is privileged to claim as one of its own developers.
