Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
I’m Ian Ehlert and I’m Dribbble’s newest hire, working in development. I’m happy to say that my current location is sunny Davis, California! I just recently moved here from chilly Minneapolis, Minnesota mostly because I couldn’t take another winter, but also in part because my girlfriend is going to grad school here. I’m thrilled to live here now because it rarely even gets below freezing and Davis’s city motto is “Most bicycle friendly town in the world.”
My one concern in moving to Davis was that I wouldn’t be able to find any ultimate frisbee to play. Ya, ya, make your hippie jokes (Patrick) and say “it isn’t a sport”, but until you’ve tried it you have no idea how awesome it really is!
What are you working on?
I’m currently trying to finish up development on a project that I think of as “Buy this thing!” It’s been a decent project to help me build up familiarity with the Dribbble platform, and working closely with Dan and Rich is a very rewarding experience (Rich did you catch that pun? Rich + rewarding … I’ll try to do better.). I have to say, the Dribbble codebase is quite pleasant to work with. There are parts that show its age, but the other developers really are top-notch and have kept it well groomed over the years. Props to Tristan and Patrick.
Tell us about your setup.
I’m currently rocking a 13” Macbook Pro. I haven’t been using any peripherals since I started this job, and I’m actually enjoying it more. It’s nice to be mobile when working remotely, so I can move around the apartment and outside to maximize my comfort. I do have a simple desk that I use the majority of the time on the second floor of my apartment that overlooks a farm field (and yet I’m still only a mile from a Trader Joe’s).
As for software, I’m using Sublime Text 3 for my editor, iTerm2 for my terminal, Flint for chatting with my co-Dribbblers, and generally Chrome as my browser. I have a pen and notepad nearby that I write on once a week tops. It’s gotten to the point where my handwriting is so bad that I don’t even want to bother anymore and it just snowballs from there.
Choose a favorite shot from another Player. Why do you dig it?
Globe by Dave Whyte
My first real project here at Dribbble was to add thumbnails to image attachments on screenshots. In doing so, I needed to test out uploading a lot of different types of images. For brevity, and to get used to the platform, I just found other people’s shots and used those. Thumbnails for animated GIFs were giving me a bit of trouble and so I ended up searching for and uploading a number of those. When I searched for popular animated GIFs, Dave Whyte’s work kept showing up.
I’ve always had a love for animated GIFs. I think it stems back to the days of Geocities and AngelFire when you’d throw some awesome flames animated GIFs on your website to make it cool.
We threw up this awesome flame animated GIF to make our website cool.
Anyway to cut a long story short (but still probably too long), I really enjoyed Dave’s work in particular. There’s something about a simplistic, perfectly-looped gif that just gets to me.
(Ed. Note: Thank you, Ian, for giving me the opportunity to point our readers to last week’s Moonlighting, featuring the amazing Dave.)
Find Ian at Dribbble and on Twitter.
Find more Interviews stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact stories@dribbble.com.
