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.

I I can’t believe I have been at Mason Law over a year already. This new gig has been nothing but positive.

In retrospect, it has been a productive year. I redesigned the Law School’s website using responsive web design and brought the codes up to the latest standards. I created a number of websites to serve the faculty, students, and staff including faculty personal web pages, the law library’s blog, student organizations sites, the Admissions Intranet, and various websites for other law school programs. I even started a blog to keep track of the projects I have worked on as well as notes and references to do my work.

My goal for this coming year is to update the content management system for the law school’s website to the latest version of MODX Revolution, migrate CAAS from Drupal to WordPress, and maybe a new design for the Law web site as well.

The folks I have been working with are fantastic. I can’t ask for anything better. It was indeed a great decision to take on this new position.

It’s inevitable that George Mason plays a major part of my life. I work for the Law School. I live right by the main campus. I’ll take classes this coming fall in the School of Art. All I have to say is I am loving George Mason.

The job is fantastic. I couldn’t ask for a better supervisor. Working home on Fridays has been very rewarding for me. On lunch break, I get to drop by the campus’s Starbucks for coffee and browse the main campus library. What I really love about this library is that it always has latest books on tech and types. Like today I checked out six brand new books on typography. As a member of Administrative/Professional Faculty, I get to check out books for a whole semesters. My books aren’t due until September. Of course I return them as soon as I am done with them.

So far George Mason has been a fantastic place for me to live and grow. Now that we have a new president, I hope that Mason will prosperous even further.

Time flies when you enjoy what you do. Six months already passed since I joined George Mason School of Law. I must confess it was an intimidating move. Most of the people around me had faith in me. My wife said I could do it. One of my former colleagues said it would be a challenge for me, but I would learn so much. My new supervisor has more confidence in me than I do in myself.

The week prior joining the new employment, my wife booked a five-day vacation to Playa del Carmen. I remember driving to the airport at three in the morning feeling like I just myself into something that I could not handle. If the site and the server were to go down under my watch, I would be in real trouble. When we arrived at Catalonia Hotel, however, the thoughts were temporarily gone and it was one of the most memorial vacations I ever had. I had my adorable son, lovely wife and wonderful mother by my side.

The first two weeks at work were incredibly nerve-racking. I faced with so many new ways to do things. I spent almost a week trying to figure out how to log into the server through Terminal using SSH. By the second week I almost gave up, but I couldn’t do that. I can’t let down the people who believed in me.

I decided to stick to the gun and move forward. I used Google to learn every command line that I needed. I picked every every book on Linux, Apache and MODX to catch up. Yet the most invaluable resource I have is my predecessor. I owe the guy a great deal. He answered most of the questions that I had without being annoyed or at least I couldn’t tell in his email response.

Over the weekend I made a security update to the CMS system and if he didn’t point me to the things that I should had been aware of I would have failed. Because he did, I was successfully made the update. I have never seen anyone who moved on to a new job and yet still providing support to his old job the way he has done for me. Because of that, I will do the same if I ever to leave this job. That’s going to be far down the road.

Right now I really enjoy this job. I have an understanding and supporting supervisor. Your relationship with your supervisor makes a huge impact in not only your job, but also your life. Work and life should be separated, but the line is never clear. When your child is sick and you needed a day off, it is whether the supervisor makes it easy on you to do so. I had had time when I was even afraid to take my vacation and that what made my life a living hell.

Now I am quite thankful for this position. The hours are flexible and I could work from home every Friday. Somehow a change of space from office to home makes quite a pleasant experience. I am grateful for this wonderful job.

Sorry for the lack of updates. My new job requires quite a bit of learning. I started on Tuesday and I have been eating, sleeping and dreaming of Linux command lines. My predecessor who is writing his dissertation for a PhD in computer science is a hardcore programmer. The only tool he used was PuTTy. He turned off every graphical user interface to save resources. He also shut down everything including graphical control panel, FTP and PHPMyAdmin.

The good thing is that my new supervisor is very understanding. She gives me time to catch up on all of these new responsibilities. The folks in the building are also very awesome. I am very glad and can’t ask for anything more. These days after work I just wanted to relax and crawl into bed. I don’t even touch my brand new MacBook Pro. Definitely looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend. We have garage sale tomorrow so I am thinking of getting rid of many of the things we don’t need in the house.

Today marks my first day at George Mason School of Law. I am excited and looking forward to make a huge change to the website.