Maxroll Spotlight – Development & Design
We often acknowledge streamers and content creators in the Diablo community because it’s easy to watch the streamers and see the author who created a build guide. Because of this, we tend to overlook the team of developers working endlessly to create and maintain the website itself. Developing and sustaining the frontend and backend of the Maxroll site has been a huge undertaking by the Development Team and Maxroll would not have been possible without their major efforts. They deserve recognition for their immense efforts, and as such, we would like to share with the Diablo community what they’ve contributed to Maxroll and show them a little love!
Development and Design
As Chief Technology Officer, I designed the backend for the Maxroll website, as well as developed the generic player and leaderboards (Ranks). I’m responsible for making the website scalable, meaning that the site’s performance is not impacted by viewer volume, whether it’s 100 viewers or 1 million. It’s my job to ensure the site is always properly functioning. The best part about working on the Maxroll website is getting to work with a great team and becoming friends with everyone. The reception of Maxroll from the Diablo community has been amazing and I’m very proud to be a part of it. With such great support, it’s easy to overcome any challenges we’ve faced as a team. One of my proudest accomplishments includes developing the generic player. As a visitor of the site it may seem pretty straight forward, but from the backend it was anything but simple.
Being a Frontend Developer partnering with Maxroll as the owner of D3Planner, my role involves updating the planner to support new game features and fixing bugs as they are reported. I also helped develop the Twitch Diablo extension, the d3planner embeds and tooltips for items, skills, and sets. In preparation for Season 23, I implemented followers into d3planner. When I began working with Maxroll, I did a complete rewrite of the planner code to use new web technologies, which made it much easier to maintain and fix the bugs. We also did a full visual redesign with huge help from Yarp. Working with Maxroll has given me a new sense of purpose in developing the planner because it allows me to get more feedback directly from the content creators.
As Lead Frontend Developer, my primary responsibilities include drawing development roadmaps, fixing bugs, processing feedback and ensuring users have a smooth experience utilizing the website on all devices. I am also responsible for coding the website including how it looks, functions and smells… although I’m still trying to figure out how to implement that last one. We have such a great team of people and because of this, there haven’t been any challenges we’ve been unable to overcome (aside from figuring out how to make the website smell). Getting to become friends with my team has been one of the best parts about working for Maxroll. The website has grown tremendously starting from a simple wireframe sketch to one of the Diablo community’s best resources for not only Diablo 3, but Diablo Immortal. We don’t plan to stop there. More new goodies are baking in the kitchen, stay tuned!
As Maxroll’s Brand Designer, I strive to keep all visual elements consistent across the site. After listening to the team’s ideas I figure out the best way to implement them while maintaining the brand identity. When I was brought on, the website was essentially a shell. I started by creating the logo and then adding consistent elements throughout the website such as colors, fonts and graphics. In the beginning, d3planner’s design was completely different than Maxroll’s. My goal was to merge the two together seamlessly but keep the structure of d3planner essentially the same so we didn’t disrupt the current user base. Then I designed the Diablo Twitch extension, which was actually one of the most challenging undertakings for me. It took a lot of time and attention to detail, but I’m extremely pleased with how it came out. As a 20-year Diablo player and professional graphic designer, bringing my two passions together has been nothing short of amazing.