Artist, Entrepreneur, Capitalist.
Hi everyone! My name is John Dugan and I am a father, former actor and web enthusiast. My life is a paradox – I work in technology, but live in the country with my wife and three kids. During the week days I head up the Ecommerce division for State Supply, an industrial supply company based out of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Working in a small business requires that I wear many hats. On Monday I am a content strategist, Tuesday a UX developer, Wednesday a web designer, Thursday a data analyst and Friday the head of printer repairs.
I love working on the Web. I am passionate about startups, business models and company culture. I am a risk taker who believes that an idea is only as good as its execution. I believe in continuous learning. I believe that respect in business (as in life) is earned. And I love capitalism.
My website is a sandbox to explore new frontend technologies and document what I learn. Most of the technical content that I post focuses on the tools and platforms I use day to day: CSS, JavaScript, WordPress and Magento. Lastly, I am more of a binge poster than your average blogger – so don’t tune away from your regularly scheduled reading material.
Sites I have built
Financial Perspectives is a wealth management firm founded by my late father, Michael Dugan. The Minneapolis-based firm operates under the direction of my two uncles and brother. I designed, wireframed and built fpwealth.com on top of WordPress.
State Supply specializes in boiler room supplies, steam heating and hydronic heating. I sketched, designed and built the entire frontend on Magento. To this day, I continue to work with the Magento savants at Sonassi for backend dev and hosting.
Things I know about
As I said in the bio above, I am a former actor turned frontend developer. The common thread between the two is creation. I am passionate about using creativity and emotional intelligence to solve problems. For the better part of a decade I have done so using the technologies below.
I found code through my first love, HTML. Document structure, semantic markup and accessibility never cease to challenge and satisfy my desire for perfection.
I enjoy the challenge of crafting modular CSS using a mixture of methodologies from BEM and OOCSS to SMACCS and ACSS. Sass has been my preprocessor of choice since 2011.
These days JavaScript is moving so fast. Every day there is a new framework, library or programming paradigm. Most of my attention is focussed on the language itself.
Places I learn
The developer’s mastery of a skillset is never complete. The pace of technological innovation requires a steady diet of learning. I enjoy building my skills and staying up to date with the help of the resources below. Click the logos to see what I have been learning.
