Hi, my name's Curtis Blackwell and I like 🐐 goats 🐐.

I also build software for the web and got started in 2007. Now-simple tasks like adding drop shadows looked a lot different back then. It meant we had to create images in Photoshop then slice, export, and background-repeat 1px × ~10px PNGs for each side and corner back then. No fancy box-shadow luxury for us in the twilight years of that saucy HTML4 + CSS2 gloss.

Lately I've taken on more leadership roles in my work. Since joining Highland in January 2018, I:

• got an established dev team to learn and embrace Laravel's and Vue's conventions,
• created a framework for collaboratively defining development standards,
• organized a biweekly, all-dev meeting where we conspire to make our work better,
• mentored other developers,
• led a team in using Shape Up to unanimous delight,
• supported my product manager in her work using Thinking in Services to uncover and solve for gaps in a complex project (I'm convinced Thinking in Services is the next big thing in strategy and service design), and
• helped co-workers get a DEI working group off the ground (and kept it alive after they took new jobs elsewhere).

A unique blend of empathy, insightful criticism, a low tolerance for unpleasant working experiences, and the tenacity to improve my environment and the surrounding ecosystem make me an invaluable team member.

Outside of work, I enjoy casual and strategy gaming, listening to and making music, mixing and drinking cocktails, and going for meandering walks with my partner.