Published on 09 July 2013
I was in New York city on June 19th for an Ideapod function, coding like a madman, pulling two 16 hour days back to back after getting off the plane from a weekend in Barcelona. I was more than a little stressed, but the presentation went by, and we got some compliments for it. Walking up the stairs towards the open bar after the applause, completely drained, this tall girl I had noticed in the crowd but didn’t know came up to me and asked, “Graham?”
It took my around five seconds to remember that Graham was the name I went by in high school (I switched to my first name, Richard, seven years ago), and that I knew the girl. Her name was Jen Kinney, and we hadn’t talked since I graduated half a decade ago. She had known another one of the people who spoke, and had been completely surprised to see me there as a coder, or indeed, there at all. We swapped numbers and agreed to hang out.
The next day, we sat down in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village for an hour. She whipped out a microphone, so there’s a recording around there somewhere (which I’ll have to get from her, and edit accordingly), and we talked about where our lives had taken us. Jen had graduated from Kingswood-Oxford and gone on to do a Photography degree at NYU, doing a few fun projects along the way. One of these was about to happen again - she was leaving in two weeks for Alaska, to make a photo documentary book about a town called Whittier. Whittier is interesting because it is only accessible by a 2.5 mile long train tunnel, it was built and largely abandoned by the military, and 85% of the town lives in one tower block. Jen had spent the summer there once, and now had a grant to go back. I agreed that that was pretty cool. She dropped in the conversation, somewhere, that she needed a website for this, too.
Two weeks later, a couple of short meetings at her place and at her goodbye party in Brooklyn, I’ve got her website up. I spent a bit too long trying to do a complicated jQuery thing that really wasn’t necessary, so that on the whole, it took around 10 hours to make. I still think it’s fun, if only because of her pictures. There’ll be more updates soon. Regarding the design, Jen actually had a whole .pdf of designs from Illustrator, so all I had to do was code up the site and figure out the architecture. Together, I think it works pretty well.
Check out her amazing photography at jakinney.com. I really suggest it.
Tagged: