Blake Carroll

I'm the technical director at Impossible Bureau which is a digital agency I co-founded alongside Jeff Yamada.

We've since grown to include a wide variety of agency veterans who share the same passions for combining beautiful design with sound code tailored to help our clients form strong relationships with their customers. We are incredibly excited to use our strong backgrounds and accumulated experience into forging an agency that reflects our values inside and out.

Questions for Blake Carroll:

• What did you do before becoming a developer?

  I used to be a math teacher! I have always been coding for fun since my first attempt to make a point-and-click adventure game with HyperCard. Eventually I decided to make a change and turned my hobby into a profession.

• Where do you turn for inspiration?

  I'm lucky to have been able to work with some brilliant designers and developers and share in their work and thought processes.

• Which are your favorite studios, designers or agencies?

  Impossible Bureau of course! I’ve always been impressed by the work that Fi, B-Reel, Firstborn, and North Kingdom put out because of how often they push the limits without compromising on quality.

• Is your city a good place for designers?

  Absolutely. Seattle has been heavily shaped by tech companies and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest is an inspirational backdrop for the active arts scene which provides plenty of opportunities and culture. I also like visiting the rest of Impossible Bureau in the Salt Lake City office or San Francisco which are excellent places for designers too.

• Which technologies are you excited about?

  I'm happy to see support for WebGL grow in browsers. We're always striving to build the most native feeling experiences and this is a crucial technology for achieving that kind of performance and modern effects.

• Do you listen to music while you work? Describe your playlist.

  I lean towards instrumental and ambient music for work if I listen to music at all. Outside of work is a different story, but when I'm focused I don't usually notice the music. I'll actually put headphones on and forget to press play if I don't do it before I start working.

• Have you always had a keen interest in technology since childhood? What sparked your interest?

  Getting some C++ books and tinkering with an LCII desktop won me over as a kid. I remember being fascinated with trying to figure out what all the different files were for. Learning later to program was exhilarating as each line of code had the potential to produce a result like pressing a piano key. Each key would grow into a melody which felt like you had suddenly obtained some arcane knowledge.

• As a developer, where do you get your inspiration from?

  I'm lucky to have been able to work with some brilliant designers and developers and share in their work and thought processes.

• What essential items are in your developer toolbox?

  Just about all my web work involve a mix of Bash, Git, Livereload, Chrome, Sublime, and Slack which is our company wide chat application of choice. I'll also have a handful of other automation tools similar to Grunt and Bower or their domain-specific equivalents.

• What programming languages do you use? Which did you learn first?

  My work involves using Javascript, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Objective-C, but I started out with C++ and Java.

• Where do you see the industry in 5 years?

  I'd expect to see a growing trend of agencies partnering with their clients more intimately to help their products evolve. It's a nice balance where hiring an agency will bring a complete set of specialists to help push things forward for companies that feel they need a fresh perspective. It's one of the main draws for people that love working at agencies because the projects have so much variety.

• Are you working on any personal projects?

  As a company we're beginning to spin off some internal side projects which I'm thrilled about. It’s nice because we still retain a lot of autonomy as one would in a personal project while being able to collaborate with like-minded colleagues who share an established chemistry.