I’m Nathan E. Lilly
I’ve used my artistic training to become a software developer for Fortune 100 companies in the technology, media, and finance.
I grew up in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia where I attended Mastbaum AVTS to earn a Commercial Art diploma. At Lock Haven University I was a founding student in the Electronic Media program and lab, earning Bachelor of Arts degrees in Fine Art (concentration in Electronic Media) and Philosophy. After college I began building websites – incrementing his skills from graphics, to coding, to programming, to full-stack development – at companies ranging from the U.S. Navy Fleet Material Supply Office, JP Morgan Chase, GMAC Mortgage, The Vanguard Group, and Comcast NBCUniversal.
Since 1998 I have developed applications from concept to completion in a wide variety of disciplines and technologies: Full-Stack Development (AWS/Serverless, MERN, LAMP); User Interface (UI) Engineering and Front-End Development (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Frameworks); User Experience (UX) Design, Human Factors, and Accessibility (A11Y); CMS Development (Discourse, Drupal, WordPress, etc.), Information Architecture, Content Strategy; Illustration and Visual Design; Interactive Media, Animation and Motion Graphics.
I began working at my first job was when I was fifteen. I worked on Saturdays and Sundays for a Produce Outlet. My job was to count. Count eight oranges to a bag. Tie the bag shut. Count the number of bags to a box. Write the number on the box. Those were my responsibilities for the first year.
In the second year I was allowed to weigh fruit. Three pounds of grapes to a bag. Tie the bag shut. Count the number of bags to a box. Write the number on the box. It wasn’t all just oranges and grapes either. There were apples too, and onions, and potatoes, and even lemons. You get the picture.
After I had been there for a while they began to trust me with money. I was put on the corner and told to sell Christmas trees for twenty dollars each. It ended up being quite a bit of cash at the end of the day for a sixteen year old in Kensington in the eighties.
My second job was during my first summer out of High School, right before I started college. I had received my Commercial Art diploma so I brought my portfolio to a small sign company on Frankford Avenue. I made what I now know is a pitiful amount of money for what I was doing. Granted my responsibilities weren’t all that difficult. I painted signs. I didn’t letter them or paint their logos or anything. I just gave them a flat coat of white paint. I also prepared vinyl so that it could be applied to the signs that I had painted. By the end of the summer though, I could pretty much make an entire sign from start to finish, except for cutting the vinyl. It was here that I learned some very important manual skills.
While I was attending college I worked many “odd” jobs. Many of them overlapped, but this didn’t cause any difficulties. Trying to find a job and go to school isn’t easy and my varied bosses understood completely. I was lucky in that I was able to find a position in my first year as a LHU Desk Attendant in Gross Hall. My duties were simple. Attend the desk, after 2 a.m. let anyone in with Gross Hall I.D., keep track of the game room equipment, and call the R.A. if there were any major problems. Mostly I was able to study and do my school work, especially after two in the morning. I finally left this job because I moved out of the dormitory.
While at college a friend introduced me to The Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. It was the most fun I’ve ever had while actually working. I was a pretzel wagon vendor. My job was to sell pretzels and water ices from the back of a wooden two wheeled wagon. It was great; Talking to people in phony accents; Dressing in period costume; Wearing a dagger. I would get up at six and run to the grounds for breakfast. After eating I would set up my cart. All during the day I would follow my route, moving from one crossroad to another. After the crowd left I would clean the cart and count out the cash earned that day. Then I would sit at the gate watching the fireflies come out as I waited for my ride home. I only wish I would have been able to continue working there. Alas, everyone has to grow up.
The summer after this I began working for Local #98, an Electrician’s Union in the Philadelphia Area. This wasn’t a bad job. I almost made the decision to quit college and become an electrician. It was good honest work and it made me happy to do it. I was a seasonal worker, which translates to fetch-and-carry. I decided to finish college after all.
In my second year at Lock Haven the Art department received the funds for a full fledged computer lab. Since I was going to be in the lab anyway I became one of the Computer Art Lab Attendants. My duties there were simple: Help anyone that needed help with any of the electronic art applications.
By the next year funds had run short in the Art department, so I was forced to find work in the main computer labs on campus. I became LHU Computer Lab Attendant. Our duties were to help any students that were having technical difficulties and to protect the computers in the lab from damage, not necessarily in that order.
On Saturdays I volunteered to help teach printmaking and 3D design to children. For the entire run of the classes I had only missed two, not bad for two classes a day for fourteen weeks. This amazed the instructors of the classes. They were used to having a different assistant nearly every week, or not having an assistant at all. The longest any one assistant had stayed was three weeks, non-consecutive. Being a Fine Art student I was able to show the students some of my current work to help illustrate lessons being taught in each class. It was here that I was able to get my first taste of instructing a class. This was as fun as the Renaissance Faire, if only I had been paid.
Then I graduated from college. It was the first major transition in my life and I was clueless. After all where was a Fine Art/Philosophy Major meant to find work? I pounded the pavement until I found a silkscreen printing company named Custom Airbrush. I started off just being a printer. By the time I left I was training the new employees, designing artwork, and managing the jobs in the print room.
Unfortunately I had climbed to the top of the company and there was nowhere else to grow. I began taking Internet Technology classes at Berkeley Computer Training. At this time I left the company and found a new position as Art Director at Projackets, Inc. I was the only artist in the shop. I was able to move the company forward from a silkscreen system that used an outdated technology (primarily Rubylith) to a completely computerized system. Gains were made in turn around time for each and every job that came to the company thereafter. Additionally, shortly after I was hired, the owners had enough confidence in me to purchase additional equipment for better printing and additional services, such as sign work and digital printing. I also added full-color process, simulated process, and indexed separations to their list of silkscreen services.
About this time I was offered a position at Berkeley Computer Training as an Instructor. It was only part time but I was able to teach Graphic Design, Multimedia, and Internet Technologies during the evening and weekends and still work at ProJackets.
Then through a contact at Berkeley I was put in touch with JSP Concepts, a computer tutoring company. JSP Concepts hired me to tutor individual students to use graphic design applications. It was a much more personal experience. The majority of my weekend were spent with Jack, a semi-retired engraver who had recently purchased a computer and wanted to learn how to use it to make his hand engraving designs easier.
Then at the end of that year ProJackets split up. The end of December was my last day working for them and 1999 became a very difficult year. I worked for a short time at US Interactive as a Project Manager. I spent forty minutes every morning driving from Philadelphia to King of Prussia. I would call this my first ‘corporate’ position. Overall I enjoyed it, but it just wasn’t the right match.
After that I supported myself mainly through freelance instruction, consulting and design. I was hired on at Ashley Graphics as a sub-contractor/consultant. I worked for Contact Charter Internet High School as their Internet Consultant. I still held positions at Berkeley and JSP Concepts as an instructor. It was a very busy time for me and I learned a lot from the experience.
My wife received a promotion to Human Resources Professional for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania which necessitated a move from Philadelphia to Central Pennsylvania. I was able to find work at TSR, Inc., a telecommunications Naval contractor. While there I redesigned the 4,000 page Navy Supply site to increase security and shorten the time required to download the pages.
At the end of a year, when my wife finished her training, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to relocate us back to Philadelphia. I quickly found work as Adjunct Faculty at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts teaching Web Development. And shortly after that finding a full time day position at E-duction, Inc. as their new Electronic Media Manager.
I moved to JP Morgan Chase to work on client credit card microsites where, at one point during a round of cuts, I was kept on because I knew QuarkXpress, and I could work cross-functionally with their print team.
At GMAC Mortgage I worked on the main GMAC Mortgage customer site and did some work on the Ditech site, as well as a few other microsites.
While working at The Vanguard Group I was on the UCD team and worked on a CBD integration project. We were tasked with exploring the possibility of using component based design in a JSP environment.
At Comcast NBCUniversal, I’ve been primarily working on the customer facing Xfinity Help and Support site. On Help and Support I’ve been through several redesigns and re-architectures, from homebrew, to React, to Polymer, and back to React. I was lead on a special project called MARS (My Account Redesign Strategy). I started and have continually been working on ask.comcast.com: a project that is essentially an internal stackoverflow forum for Comcast Developers and Employees where they can ask questions that they couldn’t or shouldn’t ask in a public forum. I worked on a project to build a Microlearning platform for Comcast University’s College of Technologists. There weren’t any developers in the College of Technologists, so I was tasked with choosing the technology stack, doing the graphics, front-end, back-end, data, and devops. I wrote the UI in React, and for the API I chose the Serverless framework with AWS, which I had never used before and wanted to learn (Node, DynamoDB). I’m currently working on Comcast’s Open Source Software website revamp, which has been another occasion where I’ve been able work the entire stack from the graphic design, to the UI, and the architecture, choosing the technologies to use. In this case I decided to go with React and Next.js to build a static site, and use GraphQL to take advantage of GitHub’s API and show the data related to Comcast’s Open Source projects.