A love letter to Boldium

I landed at Boldium after a long job search in 2018, and nothing could have felt better than meeting Will and Suzanne. Will was so excited to have a buddy to build out their dev practice. Suzanne wanted a developer who could (in addition to Will) pull off the beautiful designs that their team came up with. Chai a red haired poodle mix who feels like she’s made out of spring twigs and feathers floating in a plastic bag, cuddled me during the interview. So this was home now.

I’m really proud of the work we did there.

There are tons of projects I worked on at Boldium that I’m proud of. But I want to talk about accessibility.boldium.com and betterweb.eco. They were internal projects that we built because we needed them. We needed these tools to have clear conversations about the things we cared about: the planet and the people living on it.

betterweb.eco

We needed better web. We needed something we could give to our clients and say, “here are 3 concrete things you can do tomorrow with or without talking to your developers.” It was a simpler check than doing a lighthouse test, or one of the other carbon tests out there.

It was helpful to give clients and to use in code reviews. I can’t count the number of times I ran a betterweb test and found a huge image that we missed. It also gave clients an easier starting point and led to quick, practical changes.

accessibility.boldium.com

First, man, can I just say Gosia & Ariel knocked the design on this one out of the park. It’s such a simple type of content, and they made it look beautiful. I also had a blast dialing the animations in on this one. But the fact that I didn’t drive this is huge. I developed a bunch of it, but building it was a company goal. And as the accessibility guy, I’m so happy that it was driven by Suzanne, Eliza, and Gosia because they wanted an easy place for our clients to get tips on making their websites more accessible. Multiple clients reached out and told us we demystified aspects of accessibility for them and made it into their content routines.

I’ll miss you guys.

That chapter of my career is over. I’m super excited about what the next thing looks like, but man oh man, I will miss every single person I worked with at Boldium.