At Buckeye Interactive, we love our employees! As such, we’ve decided to launch a new series of blog posts we’re calling Employee Spotlights. We want you to get to know our team whether you’re a client, a potential coworker, or a friend. October’s Employee Spotlight is dedicated to one of our Developes–Brandon Caylor! Let’s learn more about him–read on 🙂
Tell us about yourself! Where are you from?
I’m from a small town south of Grove City called Commercial Point.
When did you start working with Buckeye Interacive, and what do you do at our company?
I started as an intern, but it was basically a CTH gig. And evidently they liked me, since I’m here two years later!
What motivates you to get up and go to work?
As cliché as it sounds, I really love what I do. Building something that fits the clients’ needs and satisfies them is something I’m really passionate about, and it’s always fun when you get to take a blank screen and make something out of nothing. It also helps that I don’t work on the same sites, technologies, tasks, etc. all the time – every day it’s something new, which always keeps my job fresh.
How has your career grown since starting with Buckeye?
I’d say my career definitely has grown, and I’ve rooted myself more along the lines of an intermediate engineer now. I’ve learned lots of new technologies, such as languages and stacks, along with the unspoken skills of engineering, including client communication, truly understanding the problem, and finding the best solution.
How do our core values (collaboration, initiative, ingenuity) influence your day-to-day?
Collaboration
Every day I work with other engineers, designers, account managers, clients, and even sometimes the marketing team. Sometimes, tasks may only include an engineer and an account manager, but more often than not, it includes multiple engineers, an account manager, and/or a designer or copywriter. Learning to work with my co-worker’s skills and understanding the impact it can have on the end product is something we are always striving to accomplish here at Buckeye. If you don’t collaborate well, the end product is going to be affected.
Initiative
One of my specialities that I pride myself on is front end development, specifically around styling and making a site look as prepossessing as possible. Because of my interest and pride in this, I often surf the web in my free time and work time on new frameworks or methods of accomplishing something. If I find something worth trying, such as UI Kit, I bring it to the team (collaboration). And we usually implement it on a product we are building to see how it works in the real world. Doing this allows us to increase our comfortability and speed when constructing the front end of a product.
Ingenuity
As I mentioned earlier, I said one of the unspoken skills of engineering is ‘truly understanding the problem.’ Well, ingenuity and this specific skill are quite related to one another. When a client comes to us with a specific problem, there are two routes we can take: we can do exactly what the client asked – no questions asked, or we can ask the client questions, offer other methods of solving their problem, and make sure we address all of the clients “hidden” needs (i.e. maybe there was a new page on the admin dashboard that the client wants but may have forgotten to mention). At Buckeye, we always make sure we do the latter of the two, which will save both parties from frustration and dissatisfaction.
What’s your favorite part about working with BI?
Oh, man this is hard. It’s a strong tie between the work we do and my co-workers. However, I’m going to have to go with my co-workers. They’ve been there for me when I’ve been frustrated, when I’ve been exhausted, and when I’ve been cheerful. They’ve also allowed me to grow as a software engineer, providing constructive feedback and ways that I could act upon that constructive feedback. Our culture here at Buckeye is phenomenal; I’ve had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, and I can easily say that none even touch the culture here.
What’s the one thing most people don’t know about you?
Oh, quite a bit – I’m a bit all over the place. But I’d say the most shocking would be that I participate in HEMA (Historical Eurpean Martial Arts) and have taken home a few medals and patches. I primarily focus on longsword and rapier, but I sometimes practice on saber. I’ve recently gained interest in sidesword as well.
What do you do outside of working hours? (AKA, fav hobbies!)
I have quite a bit – I like to keep busy. I do enjoy the normal activities, such as spending time with friends, family, and my three cats (Trooper, Dobby, and Hallum). Outside of the norm, however, I attend a LOT of concerts, cook, practice HEMA, and play video games. I also started playing Rainbow Six Siege competitively for a team.
