Hello, I'm Joshua Britz. I'm a web developer from South Africa. I began my career in 2018 as an intern at Phiresky and I am now a Senior Web Developer at Luckybeard. Trying to explain what I do for my job is always a tricky business because I often wear different hats. I'm comfortable jumping in on a backend to sort out APIs but I can also create neat, pixel perfect sites from designs. At the same time, I have enough experience in development to be able to setup a build pipeline with a CI or to be able to analyse a site to diagnose and fix performance issues. That said, I do definitely have things that I have a particularly love and those can be summarised as making the web fast, usable and easy to build.
I have explained each of those in detail, but the TLDR; is: I enjoyed optimising and improving the performance of a website. Including SEO, accessibility and just plain load times, I have gotten good at tweaking and fine tuning websites to make the most of their performance. I also enjoy making them usable, which incorporates User Experience. Many companies think that because they have UX designer that their UX is sorted. Now I am not trying to throw any shade at any UX designers. The best of UX designs come to nothing in the hands of a developer that doesn't care or know how to use them. I have a wealth of experience with UX on websites and have worked with a range of designers to introduce new and improved versions of components and websites that help give users the tools they need to easily use the web. Of course, these things can be a pain and a bore to do, which is why they so often don't get done. In order to ease this process I help to build tools like components libraries, CLIs and build tools.
Outside of my work, I am a hiker, DM, sing in a choir and enjoy cooking. When I get the time I write articles for this site and also spend time in world building for a DnD campaign I run. I am also working on a new tool that will hopefully be out soon called Behind the Screen that will give DMs a collection of tools to help them in running their games.