What it’s like to be a web developer at Tines: An interview with Yile Ou

Written by Aoife Anderson

Published on January 18, 2022

This article was posted more than 18 months ago.

Yile Ou is a web developer and musician who brings a tremendous amount of creativity to his role on the marketing team. He turns fresh ideas and designs into a reality that reflects customer needs and behavior. Yile spends his days working on a wide range of marketing projects while also playing the keyboard and creating striking illustrations in his spare time. Read on to learn more about Yile and his day-to-day.

Can you tell us a little more about yourself?‍

I joined Tines at the end of September 2021 as the first-ever web developer on the team. It was quite a big change for me personally, coming from my previous role in a small Irish full-service web agency, where I juggled work for multiple clients daily, ranging from design and motion graphics to full-on front-end development. At Tines, I am first and foremost responsible for developing and maintaining our brand new website (where you are currently reading this post).

And also, as I’ve been explaining to everyone on the team, my name is Yile, which rhymes with tequila 🍸 – just in case you are wondering!

What does a typical workday or week look like for you at Tines?

During the first two months here, my primary task was translating the wonderful new designs into a functioning website. I was able to tap into many existing automation processes in Tines, and with the support of the excellent team, we managed to get the full site up and running in just a few weeks. A typical day during this period involved understanding and interpreting the designs, finding the best way to implement them in code, and sometimes communicating with other teams at Tines to understand their needs and how the website could support them. Of course, as a new hire, the days also included really helpful onboarding training sessions via Zoom and learning from the well-organized internal documentation at Tines to get up to speed.

Although we shipped the website in November 2021, there will always be occasional maintenance work, new pages to code up, and general improvements to the site itself. My focus has moved on to building Tines-orchestrated marketing automations that connect many different services that offer powerful APIs, such as Slack, GitHub, SendGrid, and Salesforce, and for various purposes including site deployment, webinar registrations, email systems, and more.

What’s your favorite thing about working here?

The best thing about Tines, from my perspective, is that it operates on trust. It is a great foundation upon which you will find an incredible, supportive and knowledgeable team that is likely the happiest you’ll find in Dublin. Just check out our About page to see the big smiles!

Who or what has influenced you most when it comes to how you approach your work?

I am a huge fan of Bach. His music is absolutely one of the best things on earth, and I’ve been inspired by his music in so many ways, one of them being looking through the intricate, lattice-like musical structure and seeing the underlying patterns that weave it all together. Of course, this is hardly unique to Bach, but his masterful music is really what first made me aware of those principles, years and years ago. In programming, design, art, and really, everything else in this world, pattern-finding is so crucial to have a clear understanding of the subject at hand, and subsequently constructing new ideas and creations.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Not too unexpectedly, the love of Bach led me to a passion for playing keyboard instruments. Apart from this, I also really enjoy creating “worlds” – either by design, coding, drawing, painting, or sometimes some scene-building in VR. I also enjoy indoor bouldering and badminton, and of course, meeting new people, for the best ideas are usually just a good conversation away!

▲  A winter morning in Dublin, a pixel art piece by Yile

We’re hiring! Interested in joining the Tines team? View our current openings and apply here: https://www.tines.com/careers