Developing Great Products - Frank JE Flitton

I believe a great piece of software is like a great guitar: it feels great to use, looks amazing, and the musician can create amazing music for everyone to enjoy.

I grew up in the music industry and cut my teeth programming music plugins, websites, and designing album packages. Realizing that UX was at the heart of great software, I attended design school to learn how to create scalable communication systems while teaching myself to code.

Throughout my career I’ve built CMS sites for local and national businesses, instructional courses for the University of Waterloo, and digital campaigns for ad agencies. These experiences helped me understand how businesses work and how technology solves their problems.

I have lead software engineering teams at startups and enterprise companies, building full-stack products with front-end and back-end, database, and containerized cloud infrastructure. I’ve also gained experience prototyping solutions for cross platform iOS and Android apps, and embedding AI models into web APIs.

Currently I'm a UX Engineer at Google responsible for front end development and UX design. In my spare time, I create audio production software and custom design ops tooling (Sketch plugins and Python tooling) to help me manage large UI/UX projects.

Projects

Momentum

In the music production world there are two ways to make music without the expense of a recording studio: loop samples and digital instruments. Digital instruments have come a long way over the last decade but their loop sample counterparts haven't enjoyed the same leaps in innovation. Loop samples are often regarded as a repetitive hassle or a cheap band-aid in the community due to the friction associated with working with them. This friction is caused by the lack of discoverability, cost of acquiring unique sound samples, and the cumbersome workarounds needed to tweak each loop to fit your music piece. How might we eliminate the friction associated with working with loop samples and create a flexible workflow in a digital platform?

Mojo2: Horn Section

The modern‑day horn section, various combos of sax, trumpet, trombone and other brass or reeds, forms a crucial and distinctive part of the sound of big band, soul, funk and ska. Think Benny Goodman, Birth Of The Cool, James Brown's JB Horns, Tower Of Power, or Steely Dan/Don Fagen. Hardware workstations frequently fail miserably with horns and their various specialized playing techniques, and even dedicated sample libraries sometimes only scrape the surface. Mojo2 was designed from the ground up to give the flexibility of many horn techniques to the composer as they create their track. The UI is clean, simple and feature packed giving the user 4 different eras to choose from at the highest level with the ability to dive deep to settings down to room mic positions.

Apollo Cinematic Guitars

This top-rated sound design interface marries the music industry's traditional vintage analog look with a modern UI experience. By mixing textures, lighting effects, and line work, Apollo visually evokes the familiarity of a guitar amp with flat design to create a truly unique experience.

CIGI Think Tank

I was approached in 2016 to rebrand the Centre for International Governance Innovation's (CIGI) website. CIGI is a Canadian non-partisan privately funded think tank. Their research, opinions, and public voice strives to make a difference by bringing clarity and innovative thinking to global policy making. Since the beginning, CIGI's publishing platform was driven by their researchers and board members needs. Due to the stakeholders' divergent directions and needs, their online presence became a collection of inconsistent microsites over time. The goal of this project is to better communicate what CIGI is to the public at large and simplify their publishing platform to increase readership, article discoverability and long term scalability.

Korg iWavestation iOS

KORG iWaveStation is an authentic reproduction of the original 90s device that was used by artists such as Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, and Depeche Mode. The WaveStation was the first to feature an advanced vector synthesis system that created new sounds by combining multiple waveforms. To this day it's still considered a legendary and unique instrument. This project was a dream come true. With KORG being the leading brand in music technology, it's the equivalent of being asked to reimagine the original Porsche 911 for the 21st century.

Fluid Harmonics

Fluid Harmonics is a triple play instrument featuring a sound bank of 30 guitars. The digital synth's three arpeggiators move in sync to create a fluid sound. This is graphically supported by the pick shaped knobs that visually fill with rolling water based on intensity.

The Confederation Debates

In 2017, a team of proud Canadian volunteers including myself, digitized our country's founding documents in celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary.

Open Source Code

Date Search

(1)

npm package to search time series data

binary-search module npm time-series time-series-analysis typescript nodejs

Autoyeai.com

(23)

A tensorflowJS Kanye West lyrics generator and data ingestion pipeline.

tensorflowjs react styled-components webscraping netlify webworkers tensorflow

Vue 2 Img

(17)

An easy way to convert HTML sections and charts to JPG, PNG or PDF files for download or base64 encoding.

npm-package pdf-generation html5-canvas image-converter html-converter vuejs-plugin

Vuejs Typography Filters

(3)

WIP A collection of typography Vue.JS filters to control your type and own your layout!

vuejs filters typeography layout vue2

Mockup Maker

(1)

A tool to set up video screen captures on a device mockup with Python.

Flutter For Web Deploy Script

(10)

🦋 Flutter for web production build script. Build Flutter beta channel inside your deploy pipeline.

flutter web devops pipeline netlify beta build bash-script

Blog Posts

The Performant Interface Dilemma: Taming Object Equality in React

A comprehensive guide for developers on handling object equality issues in JavaScript, with a focus on practical solutions for React applications.

Will My Startup’s Problem Be Big Enough?

How to evaluate the potential of a startup idea by understanding your Serviceable Obtainable Market, the Venn diagram of opportunity.

UX Meets Database Design, a Match Made in Heaven

Putting UX at the heart of user-centric SQL schema data modeling

I Stuffed TensorFlow.js Into a React App

Here’s what I learned about Web Workers.

Social Distance UX Research for iOS

COIVD has forced us to stop using in-person UX research. Here are some tried and true methods we’re keeping after the lockdowns lift.

How to Deploy Flutter for Web Apps with Netlify

Have you ever wanted to turn your iPad or iPhone app into a website? Flutter can do that now and this script can help you share your product with the world in an easy way.