About Ian
Ian Schwarzkopf is a web developer and product designer who builds interactive tools for the browser. At Ascension Marketing he works on a Laravel ecommerce platform with more than 750,000 customers and has built customer tools in Vue.js and Alpine.js, among them a loan estimate calculator. As a teaching assistant at Berry College he helped more than 40 students with 3D modeling, electronics and Java, and he earned his bachelor's degree in Creative Technologies there, summa cum laude. On binarytranslator.ai he builds tools and fixes the bugs the testers report.
In Ian's words
Building calculators taught me that the math is the easy part. The hard part is what happens when someone types something you didn't plan for.
Questions for Ian
- What did building calculators teach you?
- I built a loan estimate calculator for an ecommerce platform, and most of its bugs came from input, not formulas: commas, spaces, empty fields. Converters are the same. A good part of the code checks and cleans what the user typed before any conversion runs.
- What do you do when a tester reports a bug?
- First I reproduce it with their exact input. Then I fix it and add that input to the test set, so it gets checked again on every release after that.
- Why do the tools run in the browser?
- Nothing has to go to a server, so the tools are fast and safe to use on private data. They also keep working if the connection drops after the page loads.