004. Take a ski day

My second job out of school ended up being for a position I’d forgotten I’d even applied for, Web Administer for a joint venture between three local ski hills to sell winter vacation packages abroad. When I got the call to schedule the interview it wasn’t until I jotted down the address they gave that I realized that oops, I’d applied for a job roughly an 90 minutes outside Calgary in the ski resort town Banff, Alberta.

I managed to persuade my roommate to give me a ride out to Banff for the interview which went exceptionally well. They had an e-commerce site for booking vacation pages, as well listing listing ski conditions and they needed someone to handle the day to day upkeep for the marketing department. Truth be told this is closer to what we’d call a content developer position nowadays, but I viewed it as a chance to apply some of the day’s gratuitous animations to the ski industry.

It wasn’t in my plans to move out to a resort town, I hadn’t snowboarded in the 2–3 years prior to that season, but with my back pay from the agency gig drying up, and my freelance income being unsteady I was in no position to decline.

So I booked myself a hostel bed for my first 2 weeks in Banff, until I found a room to rent, then I piled my G5 and other possession into my cousin Bryon’s truck and made the move to the mountains.

Of course if some one helps you move between cities you’ve gotta buy them lunch & a tank of gas, I didn’t tell Bryon at the time, but after paying for lunch and the first month’s rent on my new room… I only had $80 to my name.

The sales & marketing department at was constructed of roughly 3–4 regional sales people covering different areas of the globe, and a core team of us helping them flesh out the administrative backend pieces.

Initially my role in all of this was to continue the build out of their website, based on the Adobe ColdFusion work that had been started by an agency back in Calgary as part of a rebrand. It was the classic case of “we started this with an agency, but now we’re bringing it in house”, a natural part of the ad agency/client lifecycle.

Most days this meant working with the sales folks to get copy written, images selected and loaded into the ColdFusion Templates the agency had created. I doubt many folks reading this have any experience with ColdFusion, but to this day it still stands out as the most obtuse coding framework/language I ever worked with.

At the time it was an early industry attempt at server side web development, giving a way to run certain functions on the web server as oppose to in browser and allowing things like site wide includes of common elements such as a nav bar, rather than hard coding in on each page.

This sounds crazy now, but in the early days of the web we had to hardcode everything in individual pages. If your site’s information architecture had 15 pages, that meant 15 individual HTML files, each containing code blocks for common elements like the primary nav. And if you wanted a nice “active” state to highlight the page your user was one? Well you’d hardcode that as well, meaning that each one of those 15 pages might just have an ever so slight variation in the navigation code.

Adding or renaming a page on your site? Time to fire up the “find & replace” feature in your code editor (likely Adobe DreamWeaver) to skim through the site and find the dozens of effected files.

ColdFusion was designed to alleviate some of that pain, and while it did an ‘ok’ job of it, the structuring of site assets often meant traversing through a pile of ‘.cfm’ files to determine which include link actually had your hard coded element… which still wasn’t stored in a database.

For a better example, consider opening the main page of your website and finding the following tag somewhere near the top of your document.

<cfinclude template = "../siteassets/header.cfm">

It looks pretty straight forward, you could probably assume your site’s menu is being generated by that ‘header.cfm’ file listed at the very end.

But what would often happen is you’d go open that ‘header.cfm’ file, only to discover that it also was made up of a number of <cfinclude> tags, surely this one marked ‘primary-navigation’ must contain the final list of our sites main menu right? If only it had been that easy.

Despite the inefficiencies of this early web app, we managed to get the site launched before the ski season opened in the fall, and were able to move onto the more active seasonal campaigns.

Drawing boxes for money — In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic I started to draft up a long form career retrospective on my 15+ years working in digital design. Looking back on how the world and industry have changed since the first line of HTML I wrote.

I wasn’t sure if anyone would ever read it, and there’s still a large chunk of the story yet to be written. But in the midst of the 4th wave of the pandemic, it could be a nice distraction from the doom scrolling. Stay tuned for future chapters.