NCSOFT redesign

It was my first project at NCSOFT, and they brought me onto it midway through. Having worked with some of the developers previously, I fit right in. A few areas of the design were still in progress, but they had already completed most of the front-end styles. In addition, I was responsible for developing the site's interactivity and content management system.

Team members did not have a strong preference for any particular JS library. In most cases, they wrote vanilla JS and occasionally used jQuery. With the company's first modern site redesign, we pushed design boundaries in the browser. At the time, I preferred to use JS libraries because it drastically reduced the amount of code that had to be written to support IE 6, 7 and Firefox. In those days, browsers were incredibly inconsistent, so writing code without libraries was challenging. Due to its modularity and integration of unit tests, we chose YUI based on my recommendation.

The team had already decided to use Moveable Type as the CMS, so that's the system where I built out all the content customization. Because it's written in Perl, Movable Type isn't trendy, but it has a useful static build feature. While the built-in features supported most content customizations, I had to create an extension to add new field types.

The site redesign worked out remarkably well. I didn't know at the time that several corporate and studio executives were paying close attention to this project. They were deciding if they would move all studio development to our team. About six months later, the company decided to move the development team to Seattle and increased the team to 11 developers. I accepted an offer to relocate to Seattle and got promoted to lead front-end developer.