WCDFW Speaker Spotlight: Brent Jett

Topic: CSS Jam Session

Brent Jett is a designer and developer in Dallas, Tx and is currently the Design Lead at Beaver Builder. He likes exploring new tools and technologies for creating things on the open web as well as finding ways to bring more of traditional graphic design into the digital creative space. 
Brent is also a photography nerd and enjoys filling instagram with adorable photos of his beagle.

How did you get involved in WordPress?

I started working at an agency after college as a designer. We used a couple different CMSs at the beginning but standardized on WP pretty quickly. I started getting more involved with the general WP community after joining the Beaver Builder team.

What do you do with WordPress?

I’m the design lead for Beaver Builder. We make a page builder plugin that allows you to design pages visually with drag and drop elements.

What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?

I started out coming to the local Austin meetup a few times, speaking a couple times and then when I joined Beaver Builder I started going to camps with my team. At first I didn’t know anyone and it was kind of daunting because the community is very tightly knit, but gradually I met more and more people and have really been welcomed into some great circles of friends.

Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?

I love how camps work, that you can get a room full of people that want to challenge their own knowledge in different ways and learn new things. Speaking is a great way for product teams like mine to give back their time and knowledge to the community that we’ve built our business around.

Why did you decide to speak on your topic?

I think it’s pretty crucial that web designers be more connected with the browser and the base web technologies, always learning, always looking for new ways to use the web. I stumbled into this idea of a jam session where you’re messing with websites on the fly from playing music and seeing how the electronic music space has evolved its technologies to make discovery more possible. I think the web is due for a similar shift in thinking where we all learn how to have our creative bursts in the browser rather than only in a static design application. I really wanted to explore that, see what’s possible, and hopefully show what I’ve learned.

What do you hope the audience gets from your talk?

I’m hoping that people leave the talk thinking of new things they can do with the browser, ways they can use it as part of the design process and not just for their final production websites. Also that they might gain an interest in some of the emerging web technologies and finding ways to use them sooner rather than later.

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 10-11. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!

WordCamp Dallas / Fort Worth is over. Check out the next edition!