In this episode of the No Code & Code podcast, Jason Barone takes us on his journey from auto mechanic to a senior design engineer at Uber in San Francisco. He talks about starting his own business building websites, which led him to become one of the top Squarespace freelancers, which in turn helped him land a job at Uber.
Because Jason was a non-technical designer, he started looking for what we know today as no-code tools over 15 years ago. This led him to Squarespace back in 2006 when the company was still fairly new and small. As one of the early adopters of Squarespace, Jason found himself constantly pushing the limits of the site, submitting countless feature requests.
He eventually became somewhat of a Squarespace celebrity, being a top contributor to the forums, Quora, Twitter, and moderating the Squarespace sub-reddit. Squarespace's employees would even go out of their way to take pictures with Jason when they saw him at meetups.
So when Uber needed help scaling their Squarespace websites, they found Jason pretty quickly. At the time, Uber had over 1,000 no-code websites for city operations hosted on various platforms such as Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, and Wordpress. Jason solved this by building a sophisticated, cloneable Squarespace template that consolidated all cities into one system. Afterwards, he joined Uber's enterprise web platform team and rebuilt the product internally with the larger web team.
Jason also touches on the structure of the team he worked with, the amount of time it took to migrate everything (hint: it’s longer than you’d expect), and the one main feature that Squarespace has yet to build out.
You can find Jason on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Fun fact: Jason created the logo, visual brand, and design system for Bridge!
Tools & services mentioned:
- Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/
- Squareront: https://squarefront.com/
- Weebly: https://www.weebly.com/ca
- Wix: https://www.wix.com/
- Wordpress: https://wordpress.org/
- Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/?via=header
- CodyHouse: https://codyhouse.co/blog
- Codrops: https://tympanus.net/codrops/
- Zapier: https://zapier.com/
- Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/
- Bubble: https://bubble.io/
- Shopify: https://www.shopify.ca/
- Salesforce: www.salesforce.com
- Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
- Coda: https://coda.io/
