New Crew Member: Janie Clayton

Janie joined the Ten Forward crew this fall as our new primary iOS developer. As a national and international speaker on graphics programming, she brings a unique skillset to the team, and we're super excited to have her on-board.

An avid chef, she quickly won us over with her homemade hot chocolate (and her adorable service pug, Delia).

Janie literally wrote the book on Metal programming; join us for a book release party on Tuesday, January 16th, 2018!

Catch her at RWDevCon April 5th to 7th, 2018; check out her blog at redqueencoder.com, and follow her on Twitter at @RedQueenCoder.

What brought you to Ten Forward?

“I met (Ten Forward president) Brian at a conference, and I’d seen (former Ten Forward VP) Mark at a few meetups, and they seemed like solid, decent people to work for, so I decided to come here!”

What are you looking forward to learning or doing in your new position?

“I’m actually looking forward to doing more network-based stuff. Most of my experience is in graphics and game development, so I don't really understand how network calls work. … I’m also looking forward to actually having coworkers!” (laughs) “Before this, I spent a year working from home and writing a book.” 

What’s your impression of Ten Forward so far?

“Everyone seems really nice, and like they care about doing high-quality work without it being ego-driven. They’re very cooperative and we all want to do the best job that we can.”

You also come from a journalism background (holla!). How do you think your journalism skills apply to your programming?

“I feel kind of like programming is just another way of doing grammar and syntax, like you do in journalism. It’s telling a story, just doing it with code instead. I also wrote a book, and do a lot of conference talks and outreach in the community, and journalism helped a lot with that.”

Got any conferences coming up where we can catch you speaking?

“Only one lined up right now is RWDevCon April 5th to 7th, and I’ll be talking about how to integrate Metal shaders into SceneKit. It’s how to do better, custom 3D graphics.” 

Fill in the blanks: "If I could only __ one __ for the rest of my life, it would be __."

“If I could only own one breed of dog for the rest of my life, it would be pug.”

Speaking of, let’s see some pictures of your pugs!

Delia

Olive

What's something about you people might find surprising?

“I don’t know, because I tell everybody everything about myself! Something people might find surprising is that the car I drive is a replica of a 1970s race car. It’s a Volkswagen GSR - it’s like a tricked-out Volkswagen Beetle with a racing engine and a stopwatch on the dash, so you can use it for drag racing. They only made 3,500, so it’s a numbered car.”

Favorite board game/video game, TV show/movie, band/musician, emoji.

Board game: “Rivals for Catan”
Movie: “The Lion in Winter”
Musician: Trent Reznor
Emoji: 🍸

Star Trek or Star Wars?

“Star Trek, all the way.”