Four+ years at Hypenotic

I joined the Hypenotic team in 2015 right after graduating from Juno College’s (formerly HackerYou) Full‑Time Front‑End Web Development Immersive. Hypenotic is a founding Canadian B Corp made up of strategic, creative, and technical problem‑solvers based in Toronto, Canada. They focus on working with folks (visionary entrepreneurs, innovative non‑profits, and intrepid “intrapreneurs”) focused on systems change.

Rather than individual case studies, here’s the condensed journey of being a part of – and growing with – the team.

WordPress

I started with pure WordPress theming. Got really friendly with the codex and PHP. Making custom fields and custom post types was my jam. I led development for sites early on with the help of the team, which brought huge lessons in failure (e.g. “What do you mean a plugin update will crash a whole site even if it works okay locally and on the development server?”) and recovery (i.e. take a breath and create action items. Eventually you’ll become quite adept at figuring out which places to look first. Psst: check your .htaccess and wp-config.php).

WordPress REST API + Headless CMS

In 2015, WordPress made the REST API available as a plugin, and I started experimenting. Now how do we work all this cool functionality into a project in a helpful way? We always wanted to test the headless CMS route, so...

React + Vue.js + Vuex + Mentorship

React was the hot framework, so I decided to see what all the hype was about. The team had never tried delving into JavaScript‑focused applications, and Lionel (Lead Dev) kept talking about Vue.js’ rising popularity, so I jumped into what folks were saying was the harder one to grasp: React. I completed Wes Bos’s React for Beginners course and was bent on learning more. Because of our team’s interest in Vue, I also took Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s Vue course. In the end, we decided to invest in learning Vue, because we liked the framework’s syntax and architecture and thought folks would onboard faster – and we weren’t giving up any functionality-wise.

Around this time, we also welcomed and mentored new folks (interns and hires) on the dev team (it was just Lionel and me thus far). This required creating the space for people to experiment while also building a sort of curriculum to both educate and move projects forward.

Nuxt + WordPress REST API + PM2 + NGINX + Delegation

The downside to creating a purely Vue app is the lack of server-side rendering (SSR). So I advocated for using Nuxt, which gave us the framework to create universal applications. Yes, search engines may be getting better at crawling static SPAs, but I wasn’t convinced that was sufficient—our clients needed fully crawlable sites. So: SSR they would have.

We also built a lot of customized WordPress REST API endpoints to fetch cleaned-up, structured data efficiently. That meant diving into SQL queries—a new and challenging shenanigan.

Site launches were another hurdle with our new stack. We overhauled our deployment software (on Linode), using NGINX as the proxy and PM2 to manage our processes. Huge thanks to Hubert for helping through the transition, and Lionel for elevating everything.

Final Year & Team Growth

In my final year on the team, newer developers stepped up to lead projects (hugs sent to Luca and Hubert). It was really rewarding to see how the team grew.

Thanks for the four+ years, folks! ❤️