Farewell to Thrillworks

April 19, 2014 - By

A week ago was my last day at Thrillworks! It was a bittersweet day. I’ve loved my time at this agency, and they truly have an amazing team. I left on good terms, and am excited to be starting a new chapter at CarPages.ca on Monday. 

There are a few reasons for the change. I’ve been working in agencies since 2005, and mainly need a change from this (not Thrillworks specifically). The move to Car Pages will allow me to focus on a single site and to learn some technologies more thoroughly than I could juggling multiple simultaneous projects.

There’s a lot I will miss at TW, but this change comes at a good time for me. I wanted to take the time to list some highlights of my time at Thrillworks!

  • I applied with Iwanttobeathrillworker.com (archived here) – this marked the invention of the term “Thrillworker” which is in the company’s everyday vernacular now!
  • I was pumped for the ability to work with massive clients like BlackBerry, Suncor, Tim Hortons, Pet Valu, Manulife, and many many others
  • I posted my band’s artwork in a BlackBerry music player screenshot for all of the Asian Pacific sites 😉  (not nefariously, due to licencing restrictions we had to invent something here)
  • I started as a designer, but soon discovered I couldn’t do design and front end development at the level I wanted to; and decided to go niche.
  • I made so many great life long friends!
  • I started at Thrillworks right before a massive surge in technology changes in web development. I probably summed it up pretty well in my departing email:

I’ve committed my last code, I’ve compiled my last stylesheet, and I’ve Redded my last dot. The time has come! But I always have time for one more long email!

 

In my nearly 5 years here I’ve had so much fun working and learning with you all. In that time 29 versions of  Google Chrome have come and gone. Mobile and tablet web came into being. Methodologies like OOCSS and SMACSS were born. HTML5, CSS3, and the advent responsive web design completely changed everything. Preprocessing languages like Sass started popping up, and more new tools and frameworks than a human could count became household names. Maaan. It’s been a wild ride.

 

I’ve spent more than a sixth of my life working here too! I learned how to drive automobiles, went bald, and had two beautiful children! Probably not in that order.

 

There are so many highlights of working here; URL shorteners, salty cheese bagel burgers, blank code block, becoming the Darryl of WordPress, the 3 QA Manager Annual Innovation of the Year awards, BBQA, the new CSS layout grid system, and writing more documentation than any human could ever be willing to read! I’m also pretty sure that 75% of all the laughs I’ve ever had in my entire life have been thanks to working here *looks over at Karl who’s inventing some new crazy game with a soccer ball and cardboard tube*.

 

I’m going to miss you all so much! Stay in touch! Thanks for the final Pop, and all the adventures!

I get nostalgic pretty quick. This company literally changed who I am as a person, and a website maker; and I’m pretty sure I changed the company too.

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This post was written by ArleyM