On Tuesday, July 9 we visited Silverchair, a web development firm located right on the Downtown Mall. An awesome C4K mentor, Blaine, works there and invited us to come and learn what they do and how they do it.
The company does niche web development work, creating solutions for scholarly article sites like Oxford University Press. Silverchair makes dense and academic articles look appealing and organized on a website, often involving user interface work in conjunction with database designs.
“Silverchair makes really cool websites. The site they built for Oxford University Press gets between two and three millions hits per day!! I didn’t realize a company like this could have so many people work remotely. I like how they give their staff so much flexibility. I’d love to work for a company like this one day.” – Asad, C4K member
The folks at Silverchair were great! They were very interactive and answered all of our questions. Blaine and his coworkers showed us all around the office and ran us through a day in the life of working at a small web development firm. We asked a lot of questions, like, “What did you have to study to get this job?” and, “Have you been hacked?!”
Following the tour, we got to become designers! The Silverchair team challenged us to design a basic game called ‘Forknife,’ (a parody of the popular video game Fortnite.)
We became user interface (that is “UI” in tech-talk) designers and sketched out a sample UI for the game. We had to think about all the different components of the webpage, like pictures, links, ads, articles, and buttons. Blaine then walked us through the whole process of turning ideas and ‘design blocks’ into a coded website. We learned a lot and had so much fun.
Thank you, Silverchair!! Read about our other summer field trips here.
