Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/method-matters/tp008-kyle-ledbetter
Interview: https://www.gistia.com/insights/episode-8-kyle-ledbetter
Building Angular Material Enterprise Web Apps
Carlos Taborda, CEO of Gistia, our strategic partner to build data-centric applications, invited me to share thoughts on why our UI Engineering team selected Angular and Material Design as the foundation for our open-source enterprise UI Platform, Covalent.
Transcript Preview:
Carlos: Thank you for tuning to Tech People where real life tech practitioners share their professional experiences. Hello tech people, today we have Kyle Ledbetter on the show. Kyle has quite the profile. He is both a senior UX designer and also a senior level front end developer. I met Kyle in a conference recently where he gave a talk about angular material and I thought he would be a great fit for the show. Also, Kyle has a very interesting point of view on the day to day of Tech People as he is a senior UX experienced architect at Teradata. Kyle, thanks for coming on the show man, how are you doing today?
Kyle: Yeah, thanks, I'm doing great. Excited that you have this podcast. I was excited to meet you and hopefully, I'm going to have some information that can help others like me in enterprise where it seems like UX is still kind of a new notion, which is kind of a crazy thing but it's reality.
Carlos: It is. So, tell me a little bit about yourself and what is it that you do today?
Kyle: I work at Teradata, I'm heading up the user experience org across a whole new suite of products. We're building out a new office in Austin and we have offices in California and a lot of people working remote. Essentially what I am trying to do is hire creative individuals that are cross-disciplined. We're going to be a small team, so people have to be able to be able to jump around from design to develop. They have to know what testing is. They have to know what usability is. We have a small group of heavy hitters working on a lot of products so we jump around a lot.
Carlos: How did you end up at Teradata? I know you have a little bit of Joomla in your background also Ebay.
Kyle: Yeah. Back in the day... I'm going to feel old now, but back in the day me and some buddies were involved in the Joomla CMS project which is a huge open source initiative. Some people don't know Joomla powers probably around 3% of all websites, so there is a lot of them out there. I got on board around the early days of Joomla but I always had gripes about the user experience. It was designed originally essentially by engineers, just like a lot of things in the enterprise world. I got involved and redid the whole admin UI and UX, it was when Bootstrap 3 came out so we did it with that. It was a big change. Responsive was new and hot, so that was exciting back then. We got hired on at Ebay, which had a huge internal Joomla site for their data analytics. Then we moved around a couple of companies after that and ended up at Teradata.
Carlos: That's very cool, so it's not like... It's interesting to see the progression, especially from ending you basically at the Enterprise. What we are going to be talking about ... oh, before I jump into that I hear some rumors that we are going to run into each other at ng-conf. Is that true?
Kyle: Yeah. Definitely. We 're going to have a handful of our crew over there. We were there last year, we sponsored. This year we're coming just to party with everybody. We will have Teradata UX people hanging out.