JR
John Ritterbush

  • Full Stack Developer
  • UI/UX Consultant
  • Accessibility Advocate

I’m a Senior Software Engineer (Web) at Sprout Social. Over the past years at Sprout, I have worked on the marketing sites and now specialize in growth and product-led engineering to help our customers get the most out of our software.

About Me

I am a self-taught web developer with a background in art and art history. On paper, those things seem disconnected, but the knowledge I gained in both practices has been critical to my growth.

When I moved to Chicago, I wanted to find an arts center where I could continue my art practice and help others. After a Google search and about 10 pages of results, I found one. I joined up and helped out where I could, but in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about all the people who weren’t clicking through pages of Google results to find them.

So I asked myself...

How can I help people find this arts center?

I started doing what I do: research. I read up on building websites with a focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and went for it. It wasn‘t pretty, but it had the information people needed to find us. Not long after, searches for key phrases got their site up to #1 in search results. I couldn’t believe it, but even more importantly, I enjoyed the work I did along the way.

Since then I have continued the ongoing learning process and have built a personal library of development knowledge. I am always excited to take on new challenges to grow that knowledge.

What I have learned from...

Experience