Today we’d like to introduce you to Brad Parker.
Brad, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I was born and raised in Houston. Even though I currently reside in Downtown Austin, I still consider Houston very much my home base, and travel there frequently given my entire family continues to reside there. My father was a neurosurgeon, but rather than follow his footsteps into the medical field, my proclivities towards movies, technology and other forms of engineering and artistic expression pushed me more into the creative arena.
In college, a severe shoulder injury in 1997 landed me in a year’s long stint of physical rehabilitation, where I found that coding and user interface design was a fantastic way to get my mind off how much being injured sucked! Turns out, the digital world was a perfect conduit for my creativity, and, long after my shoulder was back in play, I continued to toil away in every accessible software I could get my hands on! I was at the forefront of animated gif technology in 1998, pushing pixels every which way, jumping in and out of every new design trend flavor-of-the-week that cropped up – Drop shadows, bevels, skeuomorphic design – I was obsessed with it, and by 1999, I discovered the wonder of Flash, which was still in its infancy at that time.
Flash took my creativity to entire new heights. It allowed me to create a treasure trove of assets that impressed enough that I was hired immediately out of college to be a part of the web team in the international offices of one of Texas’ largest real estate companies. After acquiring a Master’s in Advertising from the University of Texas, I found that the pairing of both my digital skills and modern day advertising training was a fantastic asset, and one that resulted in my leaving Texas to spend 7 years working on Park Avenue in New York City as a “Creative Engineer”.
I loved the work, and was fortunate to have had wonderful experiences working with some of the world’s top brands, I even produced and directed several short films while I lived there, one of which is currently recognized on IMDB. But I missed Texas; and in 2013, I accepted a job as the Director of Front End Development at an Austin company, and traded up my West Village apartment and 7-month bitter-cold winters in the Northeast to return to my roots back in Texas. I missed my family, the hot summers, my family ranch house, and my dog. It was good to be home!
After nearly a year and a half with the company, I resigned my position, opting to spend more time doing what I loved for considerably less money. In between freelance gigs and the occasional consulting opportunity, I have spent every waking hour trying to maximize this rare opportunity to expand my skillsets, explore the areas of tech and digital that I love the most, and hone my skills to create something new and exciting. I’m producing content every single day, exploring and utilizing all the major social media platforms, and finding time to spend weekends with my family either in Houston or at our ranch in Cat Spring.
Last week, I orchestrated a 6-person road trip expedition to Edinburg, Texas to experience the last surviving Blockbuster Video store, and make it, for one last time, “a Blockbuster Night”. It was every part of the nostalgic experience and final chapter that I wanted/needed it to be – and, as with most of my experiences, it’s up on DoubleParker.com to share with the world! 😀
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The development process towards DoubleParker’s current incarnation was far from smooth. Many of the features were partially built using a long-reigning web technology called Flash, and, during that time, Flash was the go-to medium for any and all online video content and animation. Despite its flaws, when Flash’s era ended, we lost a fully-evolved multimedia platform without a fallback, essentially throwing us back into the dark ages of the web while we waited for HTML5 to live up to its promise as a viable alternative without the glitches. Mobile development for Flash was cut, and, almost overnight, the features that made DoubleParker unique, as well as entire sections of the site, including all games, animations and embedded video components, were rendered inaccessible and obsolete!
Today, much of this content still remains trapped within the walls of Flash’s proprietary technology, but most of the video elements have been successfully ported over to be once-again viewable and enjoyed via the convenience of your personal mobile device!
The second challenge was the end goal of producing a state-of-the-art web experience tailored exclusively towards today’s modern smartphone. The objective was to emulate a native app experience using today’s web technologies, but without the need to download an app. Most of the best features available on a native app are possible through a smartphone’s web browser, but the main reason you don’t see websites utilizing these amazing features is because many of the most popular mobile browsers are deliberately hobbled by their own creators, in an effort to push more traffic to their own app stores. Apple made $34 billion in revenue just from app downloads in 2016 – Is it any true wonder why Facebook, Pandora, Instagram, and Spotify work just a bit better on phones as apps than their .com counterparts, even though the opposite is true on desktops?
Ultimately, many huge chunks of modern day code were scrapped because, while they worked fine on Windows and Android phones, they didn’t work as fluidly on Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad. In order to create a uniform experience across all mobile platforms, if a line of code or feature didn’t work consistently on all phones, it was tossed! Thousands of lines of code were written, tested, and ultimately scrapped.
The end result, however, is one that I am still immensely proud of. DoubleParker.com offers a consistently stable experience no matter the smartphone, not an easy feat given the differences of how code is interpreted by different browsers! In addition, every month, the browsers fueling these pocket-sized experiences get better and better, bandwidth is becoming faster, more affordable, more widespread, and the tools with which to create all this extraordinarily content is improving, bit by bit, day by day! Who knows — As the weaker smartphones continue to evolve, current features are improved, and new features are introduced, maybe one day these sidelined components will finally see the light of day and bring joy on DoubleParker.com! These are exciting times in mobile development!
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about DoubleParker.com – what should we know?
I like to think of DoubleParker.com as the world’s largest personal recreational project showcase. All the content you will find there is offered for free, and everything you see is all non-client-based work. You will see no paid gigs there, and I do not profit off of anything you see on the site. It’s also not intended to be a professional portfolio. Everything on DoubleParker.com, no matter how elaborate or over-the-top, has been done for free and for fun! It’s a passion project 17 years in the making, covering my adventures growing up in Houston, as well as my collegiate experiences in Dallas and Austin, and my years living and working in New York City, before returning back to Texas, where I belong!
But it’s also a bit more than that…
As a Creative Technologist, one of my passions has been to push technology to its limit, and as mobile has now surpassed desktop machines as the portal through which we most often access the web, I wanted to produce a site (as well as populate it with free and entertaining original content) that utilizes the best and most advanced capabilities of these amazing pocket-sized devices we carry with us at all times. The modern day smartphone is a fantastic piece of technology, and it’s ubiquitousness makes it possible to create a custom-tailored web experience specifically engineered to run on every Android and iPhone on the open market! At this moment in time, DoubleParker.com is “Mobile First, and Mobile Only”! While that may change later down the road, it is the first time I have poured heart and soul into an online experience intended exclusively for pocket portability, providing a native-app-like user experience, but without the need to ever visit an app store.
In the end, DoubleParker is meant to entertain, as well as impress. It is meant to push our phones to their limits, as well as push the web further! It is meant to engage, and invite exploration. At its very base, it is a personal website, created by somebody born and raised in Houston and fortunate to have had the opportunities to travel to many parts of the world, live in different places, and report back via DoubleParker.com in the form of fun content, whether it be a video, photo, game, animation, or YouTube Web Series! There are even t-shirts, tank-tops, playing cards, pens, wine labels…All promoting the site! It is meant to share, and while some of it is certainly shameless promotional plugging, it is never intended to exploit.
DoubleParker.com started 17 years ago as an exercise in HTML and PHP development (as well as a sequel to the original Parker website, hence DOUBLEParker), and for many years afterwards served as a “Creative Stomping Ground” for everything I was working on at the time, whether it was Graduate School-related assignments, recreational tinkering with technology, or simply fun Flash animations. In December of 2016, the dated look-and-feel of the original user interface design and splintering codebase finally wore on me, and the decision was made to reinvent the brand and the site to something more reflective of 2017: A website experience designed exclusively for today’s modern-day smartphone! The end result took four months, hundreds of hours of labor over a keyboard, and something I am truly proud of!
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Building and maintaining a non-profit site like DoubleParker.com isn’t exactly a lucrative business decision. Putting the time, effort and energy into something that generates zero income and is a total time-vampire might be considered somewhat of a gamble even from the most optimistic of angles, but the experience along the journey has been rewarding in so many other ways. The challenges that cropped up during its development were often frustrating, some staggeringly so, and certainly there were many times when I questioned if it was even possible to finish with the level of quality I’ve always expected of myself, when I was having to make so many concessions due to code incompatibilities – but I continued on, regardless. I have loved the outcome!
So I guess the qualities that got me this far is a stubborn, steadfast resolve to follow through on a pretty ambitious goal, as well as the creative abilities to produce so many different types of content, paired with a strong, innate curiosity to try new things, explore new areas of tech and dive into real world experiences whenever and however I can. From here, the site and the brand will only continue to grow. DoubleParker is continuously expanding outward on both ends – More content is being added, and older content is being dusted off, preserved, shined-up to its original luster and re-implemented in the archives section.
And, because of my need to always be seeking out the latest online web trends and components, DoubleParker will continue to evolve and improve, day by day … Hopefully, time allowing, for years to come!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.doubleparker.com
- Email: brad@doubleparker.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doubleparkerdotcom/
- Other: http://www.imdb.me/bradparker
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