Today marks my 10^th year working at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School as Director of Design and Web Services. A decade in the web-industry timeline is eternity, but it still feels like yesterday when I took on this position.

In my first three months on the job, I single-handedly re-coded the entire website from scratch. I ripped out all of the HTML markups and CSS presentations and rebuilt everything from scratch. Our site was one of the first higher education websites that went responsive. In retrospect, I am glad I took that approach right from the get-go. In the past nine and a half years, our website has gone through many iterations instead of major redesigns. Because of the solid foundation I built from the beginning, our website stands the test of time.

In the last few weeks, we conducted a handful of user studies, in which we asked current students to share their experience using our website. We gave them a few tasks and asked them to do as we watched their browsers. They found our website easy to navigate and they could find what they needed. They provided us suggestions we can improve, but the feedback had been positive.

As CSS grid has become stable, I wanted to go back to replace complicated floats with grids, but the task seemed overwhelming. In the past five years, I have taken on new roles beyond the web, which included marketing designs and email newsletter. I could not dedicate my time to make the transition. Every time I looked at my SCSS file, I wanted to just throw it away and start from scratch. Unfortunately the site had grown so much in the last decade.

After our latest redesign under the new dean direction, I decided I need to tackle this issue. Now that I have a designer to help me with graphics and a developer to help me with day-to-day requests, I could focus on refactoring the CSS elements as well as cleaning up the HTML markups. Simply replacing float layouts with grid layouts make the CSS file much more cleaner and manageable. In addition to simplifying the CSS elements, I was able to get rid of tons of unused styles.

Although the work was entirely behind the hood, it made me feel great. I had accomplished something that I had wanted to do for quite a while. The overall visuals haven’t changed much, but the details have been hammered out. Because I have invested my time, energy, and effort into our website, I take great pride in my work and I treat it with tender, love, and care as if it is my own baby. I take the responsibility and the ownership of it. I expect my developer to do the same. I wanted him to put his care into it instead of just dashing off to complete the requests. Every piece of markup needs to be clean and no inline styles unless absolutely necessary.

I understand that we have to do things quickly, but doing so carelessly will come back and bite us in the long run. Our website has come a long way. The day of hosting it on a GoDaddy dedicated server is long gone. I am so glad that we had migrated to MODX Cloud with the help of the incredible MODX team. From the server side, our site is now fast, secured, stable, and in good hands. From the frontend side, the HTML markups and CSS presentations are streamlined. The design is still fresh and modern with exceptional typography.

If everything goes well, I will stay with the law school until my retirement. I only have about 20 odd years to go. I don’t know if I will be able to keep up with the web industry in my 60s. That’s a scary thought. Then again, I have not kept up on the latest trend a decade ago. I am still doing fine thus far. I can’t see myself doing anything else besides web design and development, but I never know what the future will hold.

Cuối cùng cũng tuyển được người phụ tôi trong công việc. Tuy cô chỉ mới bắt đầu tuần này nhưng tôi quý trọng cách làm việc của cô. Khác hẳn với cậu trước, cô làm việc tỉ mỉ và thận trọng nên tôi rất an tâm khi giao phó công việc cho cô. Hơn nữa, cô học tập rất nhanh. Tuy làm việc với nhau nhưng tôi với cô chỉ liên lạc qua emails. Tôi thích cách cư xử chuyên nghiệp của cô, không chỉ riêng tôi mà luôn cả những đồng nghiệp.

Thú thật lúc đầu tôi không chọn cô ta là vì tôi nghĩ cô quá dư tiêu chuẩn (overqualified) cho công việc part-time này. Khi xem qua résumé, cô có bằng cao học. Hơn nữa cô giỏi Anh văn, chụp ảnh với tầm mắt nghệ thuật, và viết code rất khá. Trong phần phỏng vấn, cô chậm rãi trả lời từng câu hỏi. Cô luôn suy nghĩ trước khi trả lời và câu nào khó cô càng ngẫm nghĩ lâu hơn. Những người phỏng vấn đều thích cô. Tôi cũng rất mến cô nhưng tôi nghĩ công việc này không xứng với tài năng của cô.

Vì đây là công việc part-time nên cô không được quyền lợi nhiều. Tôi không dám hỏi về đời tư của cô. Chẳng hạn như cô có bảo hiểm cho sức khỏe hoặc cô có đủ tài chính để xoay xở cho đời sống hay không? Tuy không phải là chuyện của tôi nhưng tôi cảm thấy không công bình cho cô. Tôi sẽ cố gắng chuyển cô qua full-time.

Matthew Krishnan joined George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School as Backend Web Developer in February 2017 and quickly became an essential member of our team. With his technical knowledge, including PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS, he played an important role in maintaining and managing our content management systems: MODX and WordPress Multisite.

His skills in communication were even more impressive. He worked well with everyone around him in a professional manner. He went out of his way to support any law school member who needed web-related help. He even offered WordPress training to faculty, staff, and students who would like to update their own website content.

As someone who had been working closely with Matthew in the past four and a half years, I appreciated his patience, independence, and reliability. These qualities were so crucial in a remote environment; therefore, we were able to work in an effective, sufficient collaboration during the pandemic.

In addition to his work for the law school, Matthew studied tirelessly to earn his BS, with Magna Cum Laude, in information technology from George Mason University Volgenau School of Engineering. I admire his hard work and educational dedication. I have tremendous respect for him not only as a colleague but also as a friend.

When accepting the offer from George Mason University, I thought I would only stay for a year or two. Eight years later, I am still with the Law School. It has been a long, challenging, rewarding journey for both my professional career and personal life.

I joined the Law School after leaving a stressful job. At first, I hesitated to take on a new role as Web Services Developer, which included server administration as part of the job. I didn’t know anything about Linux. I had never used the command line. I never heard of the content management system called MODX. I spent my first week googling how to set up RSA and SSH to access the servers. I read online documentation just to add my own admin account in MODX. It was a huge hurdle to get through in the first six months. I almost quit.

While the technical challenges stressed me out, the people I worked with were awesome, especially my kind, understanding supervisor. I simply could not let her down. She gave me the support and the flexibility I needed to balance my work and life. It is extremely important to me to have the flexible schedule because I young kids. I cannot put all the burden on my wife. Getting them to daycare and school in the morning is a challenge. Taking days off when they got sick is a must. Chaperoning them to field trips is part of being a parent. In eight years, my boss never expressed any negative vibe when I requested time off, came to work a bit late, or left a bit early. To reciprocate her generosity, I never hesitated to work on weekends or late-hours when I had to.

What has been so great about this job is the trust she placed in me. Without micro-management, I thrived on my own. She didn’t have to tell me what needed to be done. I took on projects that needed attention and look for projects that would benefit the school. In the past eight years, I expanded from three sites to thirty sites. In addition to MODX, I implemented WordPress Multisites to offer anyone in the Law School a web presence and still manageable. Even though my responsibilities were strictly web services, I offered graphic design solutions and created a unified brand for the school. It saved the school tons of money from hiring outside design agencies.

Several years ago, I was promoted to Director of Design and Web Services. In the new role, I am supervising a junior web developer to help me out with daily requests and web support for the thirty sites we’re maintaining. I am giving him the flexible and the trust that my boss has given me. At the moment, everything seems to go well.

I don’t know what the future will be like as we’re the process of hiring a new President for the University and a new Dean for the Law School. I am not sure how the new changes will have an effect on me. I do not want to think too much about things that I cannot control. I do hope that my supervisor won’t be retiring anytime soon. That will change everything.

During our family reunion, we had an intriguing discussion about our profession while enjoying a bottle of Don Julio. My wife’s aunt said that she had worked for her company over 30 years and that she would never take on the lead role. As a minority woman who is in her 50s and isn’t fluent in English, she rather stayed in the technical position than being a leader. My cousins agreed with her perspective. To them, a leader has to have perfect English and the ability to bullshit. As Vietnamese, we were not trained for those leadership roles. She went as far as criticizing the way we raise our kids different than the way white people raise their kids to prepare them to be future leaders.

I completely disagree that leaders have to have perfect English. For example, Ángel Cabrera is the president of George Mason University and he speaks with an accent. I am director of design and web services at Scalia Law School and I don’t speak perfect English either. As leaders, the way you communicate is more important than your accent. Yes, I have seen leaders who bullshitted their way through, but you can smell them miles away. I have no respect for those leaders. For me, leaders don’t have to have in-depth technical skills, but they need to have a vision and enough technical knowledge to understand what is possible and what’s not. Because I have technical background the people who answer to me can’t bullshit me. I understand what’s possible and how to accomplish it. Likewise, the people above me respect not just my leadership skills, but also my technical skills.

As for parenting skills, I did not understand the comparison between my cousin whose wife is Jewish and us (two Vietnamese parents). They have one boy. We have four. Of course, we can’t spend all of our time on one kid. I found her reasoning to be laughable and somewhat offensive. I don’t mind her criticizing our parenting skills, but putting down our son is hurtful.

It is time for us Vietnamese to stop using our language barrier as a clutch. We need to get over it. In fact, we should use it to our advantage. We can speak both languages. We bring a diverse perspective into the team. Let’s take on more leadership roles than simple be led.

My current title at Scalia Law School is Director of Design and Web Services. I supervise a part-time employee who helps me out with updating content, managing MODX and WordPress, and putting together HTML newsletters. As for my role, I am still involved hands-on with design and development.

For design, I am still kicking ass in Illustrator, Photoshop, and typography—I wrote two books on it. I still work with the Dean’s office, admissions, alumni, and various centers to design print materials ranging from magazine ads to invitations to conference’s programs.

For the web, I am still kicking ass in HTML and CSS. I design in the browser and have not touched Sketch, Figma, InVision, or any UX tool. I write a bit of JavaScript and PHP. I can develop sites with content management system including MODX, WordPress, and Kirby. I have not touched any design or JavaScript frameworks.

I am not in the market to look for a new job, but I wonder if my skillsets will still be useful. My current director role isn’t conventional because most design and creative directors aren’t hands-on. By keeping my hands in the technical side, I understand exactly what designers and developers are doing. I know about performance, accessibility and usability.

Five years of hard work have paid off. I have been promoted to director of design and web services at Scalia Law School.

In my recent role as a web services developer, I was responsible for server administration and content management system. Being a designer, I took upon myself to help shape the design direction for the school and its branding, particularly when we changed our name from Mason Law to Antonin Law. As much as I had enjoyed being a jack of all trade, my job had become overwhelming.

My supervisor and our senior associate dean have recognized the growing of the school, they had promoted me to the director position and promised to hire a backend developer to work with me.

In this new role, I will be making design an integral part of the school’s brand, message, and recruiting effort. I will be focusing on the design strategy of the law school’s websites rather than the back-end development, but I won’t be hand-off completely. I will continue to do design and front-end development. I will collaborate with the back-end developer on the CMS and server side.

We will be searching for a back-end developer soon. If you are a web developer or know someone in the Metro Area and would like to join me, let’s talk.

I am looking forward to new challenges and opportunities in my new role.

Yesterday someone congratulated me on LinkedIn. I can’t believe it has already been five years since I joined the law school.

These days my role has extended beyond web development. I am the go-to guy for most of the design and marketing materials. I am juggling five to six projects at a time ranging from setting up a new site for a new center, laying out an eight-page program for an event, creating banner to recruit students, making landing pages and forms for digital marketing efforts, coding email newsletters to securing the web servers.

My workload can be overwhelming, but the support from my supervisor allow me stay sane. Working full time with three kids is a big challenge, particularly with time management. I deeply appreciate the flexibility that she has given me. In that regard, I don’t think I can find it anywhere else. In return, I do my work whenever necessary—even at three in the morning.

Another rewarding aspect of my work is being around the wonderful colleagues. They always make sure that we have a friendly environment to do our job.

Last summer Mason Law web site undergone a major realignment and simplification and we have continued to work on smaller details. We are taking small steps to prune down our landing pages. For example, the current landing page for students featured massive list of links. The new landing page for admissions is much more pleasant to look at. This is something I have wanted to do for a while, but couldn’t get buy-in to cut down the unnecessary links until now. We will be rolling out each landing page at a time.

In an unrelated note, my supervisor gave me superior performance and exceeded expectation for 2014. I couldn’t be happier. I really enjoy working at the Law School thanks to the people around me. The flexibility allows me to balance between life and work. I perform much better when I am not under stress. My deepest gratitude to them.

If LinkedIn didn’t congratulated me on my third anniversary at George Mason Law, I would have forgotten. I had to track down this blog to remind me the exact date I started. It was October 18, 2011.

Wow three years already. In retrospect, what had I accomplished? Other than the day-to-day tasks, like adding new functions, features or designs, I relaunched the main site twice, brought more faculty, staff and students to use WordPress CMS, and maintained and secured the two dedicated servers.

In addition to my job, I also enjoy being around such a group of diverse and talented individuals. I couldn’t ask for greater colleagues.

Beside my main role as a web services developer, I also get the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree as part of the tuition benefit. I have three more courses to finish after this semester. Furthermore, I was given a chance to teach what I am passionate about and what I do everyday.

I am grateful for the position I am in at this point of my career. Couldn’t be more satisfied.