It’s been quite the ride, and despite the disgusting weather we’d been having, I had sprung into an excellent first week at Wallop. I wasn’t going to let a little ol’ Vancouver rain bog it down for me.

Within the first week, I was thrown right in to the mix. I had sat in my first company meeting, engaged in a stand-off meeting / scrum to see where we’re all at with things, and had my share of dealing with a handful of clients already! For most of my first week, it was really just about making the transition from school to the work environment. It took a bit of time since it felt like I was being thrown into the middle of everything but thankfully, the person who was in the position I was taking over, had been a significant hand in helping me get into the hang of things. He showed me a lot of the work that I was going to expect, the basic tools and platforms they were using around the office and left me plenty of helpful notes and tips to reference off of — all of which has come in quite handy so far.

Everyone within the team has been really nice and willing to offer me a hand in case I needed it, even if I didn’t ask! To my surprise, there was another INTE among us! It was none other than Nick K. who had graduated from the program 3 years before my year. It certainly helped with making the transition into the work environment to familiarize myself with everyone and to know how welcoming they were. There are really great people at Wallop, and I’m really proud to be a part of a team of such extremely talented, hard working people.

Transitioning to billable work

In terms of the work itself, I was mostly dealing with clients and helping with updates and bug fixes. It was quite interesting for me to start doing billable work and what an experience that was to track all of my tasks on Harvest. As the week progressed, I was asked to take part in some of the bigger projects that the rest of the team had been working on. I’m not going to lie, it was quite intimidating the first time I took a peek into the SCSS files for some of their current projects, let alone what these sites actually looked like! The amount of high quality work they are producing, and how well organized and well structured their styling and markup alone is has been quite the eyeopener.

Within the short time I’ve had so far, I’ve really learned a lot. I truly am excited to see where the rest of this journey will take me. Until next time!

A Guide to Web Font Providers

Design

A few years ago, before web fonts became the standard for websites and other digital applications, users were either limited to a handful of web-safe fonts or were forced to convert existing desktop fonts into pseudo web fonts using some sketchy plugins. Nowadays, most fonts available for purchase on sites like myfonts.com give the user the option to purchase a web font version. These fonts that are optimized for the web ensure that they are rendered as sharply as possible on your websites. 

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