Jake Miller

• Phone: 808 366 1708
• Email: j@jjcm.org
• Github: jjcm

Bio

Once upon a time I was a freelance designer. I was given an illegal copy of photoshop when I was nine, and instantly fell in love with it. Through that piece of pirated software I eventually taught myself design, branding, color, layout, and other principles. When it came time for college, I sought to diversify and study computer science rather than the natural path of continuing with design. Through those skills I was able to bring an idea from imagination to a working piece of software in days, and I utitilzed those skills in my years as a prototyper. While that satisfied my love for bringing ideas to reality, I found myself limited by relying only on my own output. Eventually I landed where I am now - as a hybrid manager / prototyper, where I can lead to make something larger but still express ideas and creativity on my own as well.

Work

Atlassian

March 2016 - March 2021
I hold a dual role at Atlassian that I split time between. Each has different responsibilities and skillsets required.

Senior Prototyper / Prototyping Team Lead. Head of Atlassian's prototyping efforts for the last four years. I was originally hired to establish prototyping as part of Atlassian's design process, as they previously had no dedicated prototyping process or team. To pursue these efforts I set up an internal team dedicated to helping designers create explorations in code, created tools and libraries to expedite the prototyping process, ran internal classes to uplevel designers and devs in their abilities to create high-interaction code-based prototypes, and started internship programs focused on prototyping. Oh, and I built a ridiculous amount of prototypes.

Design Systems Manager. Lead on Atlassian's design systems team. On the managerial side, my responsibilites have been defining our yearly strategy and how we fit in with the larger goals for Atlassian, leading our shipment of accessible themes for users (dark mode, high contrast mode, color blind modes), working on new growth plans and promotional guides for those at Atlassian who don't fall into traditional dev/design buckets (essentially creating a unicorn job path), and handling cross team communications and requirements. On the IC side my responsibilites have been threefold: Building and maintaining the GUI pack used by 250 designers internally, building out tools that accelerate Atlassian's designers in their roles, and migrating all of Atlassian from Sketch to Figma.

Microsoft

Feb 2011 - March 2016
Prototyper. Worked to design and bring existing designs to life on several platforms including web, windows tablet, windows phone, xbox, and others. Performed fast iterations, going from an idea to a usable interaction in under two weeks.

Spawar

Aug 2007 - Feb 2011
Developer. Created a ruby on rails ship tracking platform for all ships, submarines, planes, and other mobile objects in the Pacific that would incorporate real world news feeds in order to best predict which ships were in the most amount of danger at any given time. Also did real time traffic analysis of all data being sent between ships in order to detect anomalies/intrusions.

Teaching Experience

Atlassian Figma Training Courses

As part of the process of us moving to Figma, I wanted to ensure we had No Designer Left Behind. I lead a small team to create an internal Figma trainign course that went over not just the basics of how to use Figma, but how to use it in the context of the tools and processes we had built out at Atlassian. These days we have over 200 designers who have taken the course, and of those we have a 68% retention rate of the ones who are using the custom built plugins we developed internally at Atlassian.

STEM in schools / CSFirst

For a large part of 2017 was teaching in local schools throughout Sydney via Google and MIT's CSFirst program. Mostly targetting kids in years 3-6, this ran once a week training them in early programming skills and concepts using Scratch.

Atlassian Prototyping Course

Currently teaching the third session of the prototyping / frontend development course I run at Atlassian. It's an intensive 12 week program where we train designers how to do front end web development, with an emphasis on building their ideas quickly and testing often. This runs through html, css, javascript, preprocessors and testing. The lesson plans I've made for this are available at my site prototype.guide.

Personal Projects

Soci

A better model for contributing back to content creators. The project brief I made for ycombinator is likely the best overview of ths. I built the backend, API, and frontend, as well as lead contractors to work on smaller parts of the system. Still currently in development. I firmly believe the model is better and can make for a healthier internet community for creatives. Backend, webcomponent system, and a project plan for a recently completed sprint if you want to see how I plan out projects.

Mashup.fm

A social listening site. Users create a playlist, and when multiple people join the queue it plays one song from each persons queue in rotation. Allows multiple people to listen to the same thing at once remotely. Check it out: http://mashup.fm

Children's Books

Worked on creating digital books for children. Created several working prototypes in html/javascript as a proof of concept, then hired artists to draw out three separate stories. After finding that the performance of the html5 implementation of the book would not run at acceptable framerates on mobile devices, hired developers to create native IOS, Android, and Windows versions of the parallax engine according to spec. Due to having to create separate implementations of each book (instead of creating one html5 based one and releasing on all platforms at once), changed the business model from the original, free and donation supported model to a paid one. The first book is now in the app store here.

Sopablackout.org

Created the site sopablackout, which created a call to action for internet users to black out their sites in protest of SOPA/PIPA. The site provided a javascriptlet and a wordpress plugin that blacked out the site it was deployed on during the date of the protest. Eventually become on of the major players in the protest, resulting in 2.5 million hits of the script on the blackout date itself, as well as many hits to informational pages and links to contact representatives directly. The publicity resulted in me conducting live interviews for several news organizations.

Lama Rama

A mobile/desktop game that uses accelerometer input from mobile devices in order to play the game on a desktop with others. Early prototype seen here. Created all the graphics for the game, including sprites, backgrounds, intro screens and logos, etc. Game is currently in talks with publishers.

Education

Loyola Marymount University

Bachelors in Computer Science

Hawaii Pacific University

Bachelors in Computer Science