Bryan Wilhite, ‘Service-Oriented User Interface Consultant’
For 2012, my LinkedIn headline was ‘Silverlight Consultant’—signifying a year-long celebration of working for a Silverlight shop here in Century City, CA. I would like to grant myself the headline of ‘User Experience Consultant’—but I’m an honest person (for mental health reasons) and the truth (for me) says I’m nowhere near Bill Buxton.
Calling myself a consultant of user experience is like saying I’m an artist with the ability to deconstruct and (possibly) replicate a Jimi Hendrix experience. My artist chops are remarkable (and award-winning) but not in current practice as much as my IT technical exercising.
This personal imbalance between my art/science and my technical craft is the overarching, dominating problem of unsustainability in my life. This problem of mine is not recognizable for most people in my practice—only a guy like Carl Franklin (or Bill Buxton himself) would have sympathy for my years of discomfiture.
The typical self-described “technical” person would appreciate that a headline with the name Silverlight in it is rather “old”—and it overlooks my decades of investment in X/HTML and CSS—and years of joyous work with jQuery. The release of Breeze.js (and mocha) makes it possible for me to see end-to-end (server-to-client) conceptual equivalency between Silverlight and HTML/JavaScript. I still prefer Silverlight (for ‘extremely complex’ UI) but it’s honest and inclusive to roll my Silverlight work under the headline ‘Service-Oriented User Interface Consultant’ with my HTML-based practice.