A decade of making big websites

I can’t express how honored and humbled I am to be part of the amazing team of Web Chefs at Four Kitchens. In the past 10 years, we…

• Relaunched Economist.com, EW.com, and Agriculture.com
• Revolutionized content management and multi-channel publishing for This Week in Tech by decoupling the frontend and building a publicly accessible content API
• Built Saturday Night Live‘s 40th anniversary website and mobile apps, where you can watch 40 years (now 41 years) of sketches for free
• Won an Emmy for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon‘s website
• Weathered two financial crises
• Helped launch NBC.com and CNN.com
• Reinvisioned agile project management for agencies with Consultancy Scrum
• Led the mobile revolution by launching the first large-scale, responsive Drupal website (ICANN.org) and developing best practices for frontend performance tuning
• Contributed tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of lines of code to open-source projects like Drupal and Node.js
• Kept Al Jazeera’s website running during the Egyptian uprising, providing the world’s journalists with the only on-the-ground coverage of the early days of the Arab Spring
• Created a Culture of Empowerment
• Made Drupal scalable with Pressflow, headless with Saucier, and easier to deploy with Aquifer
• Were featured on Forbes.com for embracing the rules of improv
• Trained hundreds of developers and designers
• Partnered with World Pulse to create an online community of women empowering each other to change the world
• Spoke at hundreds of conferences worldwide
• Brought education into the twenty-first century by relaunching sites for Stanford’s Dean of Research, Yale, the University of Texas, the Texas Exes, and EL Education
• Expanded the reach of Public Radio International (PRI) by global syndicating their content with the Public Media Platform
• Helped countless nonprofits reimagine their digital strategy and fundraising tools
• Handed out some excellent swag
• Never lost our sense of humor (or humility — wink)

We started as a team of four working out of a ratty, third-floor apartment in southeast Austin. Now we’re a team of 33 spread across the US — and growing. (Expect several more job openings in the next couple of weeks.) It’s been an incredible, terrifying, amazing, stressful, and completely worthwhile journey.

Thank you, Web Chefs past and present, for a decade of making BIG websites and setting a new bar for quality of life and work.