Sidney Tribiana — Year Three Reflection
Like watching a timelapse, growth over the course of years can feel slow — until you look back and see just how far you’ve come. At the end of her third year at Little Taller, we sat down with Sidney Tribiana to discuss her new role as Lead Developer and the experiences that led her to a position of leadership.
Little Taller: How’s life been? You’ve been with Little Taller for three years now. How does that make you feel?
Sidney: It feels good. I feel like it’s all been kind of a blur, you know? Right after I got out of school, I started working. So it was just like, boom. But I feel like I’ve grown a lot and things that I thought I couldn’t do when I was in school, I know how to do now.
Little Taller: What has been your favorite experience or memory with Little Taller over the last three years?
Sidney: There’s a lot… Probably just watching our Little Taller website get rebranded and then, eventually, get built into what it is today. Because it’s gone through multiple changes — first we had it on Divi, then we thought we’d hard code it. Then eventually we ended up with the mix we have now. We’ve finally come to a point where we’ve established our brand and know who we are.
Little Taller: Yeah. On a company level, we were really trying to figure out who we actually are. The basis of Little Taller is still the same, it’s just how we present ourselves that’s changed.
Sidney: We’re all just a bunch of kids and a homeless guy building websites.
Little Taller: On that note, what is your favorite Little Taller culture memory?
Sidney: It’s tough because we’ve all been remote all year. I like it when people post random things in the general channel — especially when Sara posts design memes. It makes me laugh.
Little Taller: Yes! I want to start a weekly meme contest in Slack for us all. So, you’ve recently taken on the role of lead developer. How does that make you feel? Exciting? Scary?
Sidney: Exciting, yes. I’m not really used to being a leader, per se, so I’m excited to see how I do. I think I’ll be just fine. I’m doing the same thing as I’ve always done, I just have other people ask me questions and instead of telling them to ask someone else, I’m the one to figure it out and get the answer for you.
Little Taller: Do you have big ideas for what you want to do as a lead to help grow the people underneath you?
Sidney: I’d like to do the same thing Kyle did for me when I first started. He had me slowly get more acclimated to bigger projects and bigger clients. And then, over time, as I got more comfortable with those projects, I could start managing them by myself and pulling in other developers to help manage it. I think that’s how I got to be in this position, because I had the opportunity to co-manage projects and then be the lead dev on a few things and I would be like, okay, yeah, you can do this.
Little Taller: It gives you that experience and forces you to step up.
Sidney: I wouldn’t have been able to learn any of the things I know now or teach to other people if I wasn’t put in those situations or projects. So I think doing that for other people will probably be the main thing.
Little Taller: In your development department utopia, would you be the person on the throne just telling everybody else what to do? Or do you still want to get dirty and do the work?
Sidney: In my ideal world, I would still be working on projects. I’d rather do that and lead, rather than just lead or manage. I feel like I couldn’t be 100% leader and have other people do everything — I’m the oldest of the four kids, so I have a hard time with that. But a trait of a good lead is knowing when to step back and let other people do it.
Little Taller: What’s your secret “code pet peeve” that doesn’t really matter but drives you crazy?
Sidney: I try to adapt to how other people code, because everyone is a little bit different. But if you have a bunch of CSS and you don’t indent it? That’s a no go. Especially if you’re styling a page, and there’s a lot of things to style, it’s better to make sure that everything is indented, so it’s easier to read. If everything is just on the same line, you don’t know where it starts or ends.
Little Taller: How would you explain your most recent project to a 5 year old?
Sidney: Oh, are 5 year olds able to comprehend that kind of stuff?
Little Taller: Probably not, but we’re still going to try.
Sidney: So, recently, a client had these email templates where the images were broken on Outlook. So on Gmail and Apple Mail and all the other email clients, the images and the entire email lined up nicely, but when you went to Outlook, it was just the header and then the image, and no one knew why. So I had to run a bunch of tests on the email that would take a screenshot of the email on every email client. I would try to figure out why it looked a certain way on the different clients using those screenshots.
But yeah, how would I describe it to a five year old? I don’t know. The picture was ugly, and I needed to make it not ugly for other people. There we go.
Little Taller: Since we’re a teaching agency, what’s something in tech that I should know about but probably don’t?
Sidney: Okay, so, this isn’t really a learning moment, but it’s a cool thing that I found recently. There’s this thing called the Wayback Machine. Basically, they have a web crawler, a bot that searches your site and indexes everything and puts it into an Internet archive. The Wayback Machine takes and keeps screen captures of billions of websites, so you can view how sites looked at a certain time. You can see what a website looked like before it got rebranded or taken down or rebuilt.
Little Taller: This is so cool. I’m sure this could be very helpful if a site breaks. What accomplishment are you most proud of over the past year?
Sidney: Building The Inn at Mazama’s website was pretty cool. I liked working on that because I had to build that website from scratch. And then we also had to integrate a new booking engine, or property management platform, because they have cabins you can reserve and stay at — they’re a resort up in Washington. I liked doing that one because I built it from scratch. And the code is pretty clean. Kendra designed it and it looks really good. I think that was pretty fun.
Little Taller: So you didn’t use any page builders at all?
Sidney: Nope.
Little Taller: Was that weird?
Sidney: You know, I like working with custom templates. I have more fun doing a custom template than using a page builder. You have more control and I’m more used to it, building websites myself.
Little Taller: Who or what is your biggest motivator in life and why?
Sidney: I think that would probably be my family and my friends. I think the pandemic has helped a lot of people reprioritize their time and attention to spend more time with their family or keep in touch more with their friends. And that’s been more of an emphasis this past year for me too. I live at home with my parents and I have a life outside of work, so I want to be there for them.
Little Taller: If you could solve any problem in the world using code, what would it be?
Sidney: Not really a universal problem, but I listen to a lot of music. I like finding out what key a song is in or the BPM, or if there are certain chords that are in another song, or if it’s been sampled by another song. So I feel like it would be cool if Apple Music or Spotify had a tab or a section that if you tapped on the song, it would tell you all of those details. Like, this song is in the key of C and it’s referenced in another song, and then you could tap on that song and see all the details for that. I feel like it might also be helpful for kids who are studying music theory or people getting a degree in music or songwriters. Or people in general that just want to know that information. That’s just me being geeky about it, but it could be really cool, I think.
Over these past three years, Sidney has grown along with the Little Taller brand. Now, she’s coming into her new position as Lead Developer with a fresh perspective, full of new ideas. We can’t wait to see where this next year — and added responsibility — will take her.
