Ashley McQuaid, Design
Ashley is a user experience designer, information architect, and user research director who has been making websites professionally since 2011 and for funsies since 2004. She cut her teeth designing custom profiles for fellow Neopians and linking up her Neopets pet pages into extravagant multi-page websites of pre-made User Lookup selections and fan fiction. She was not responsible for the 2006 infiltration of a prep guild on behalf of the goths.*
Most recently, Ashley was an associate creative director at Amp Agency, leading user experience for brands as large as Meta and as local as Teddie Peanut Butter. Her work encompassed project strategy, user research, site architecture, and interaction design, as well as ongoing collaborations with visual design, development, and client teams. Prior to her work at Amp she was a senior IA/UX designer at iFactory, focusing on higher education, publishing, and not-for-profits. While there she managed the co-op program in addition to her work on websites and apps. She also has extensive experience in financial services, healthcare, and the interior machinations of intranets.
Ashley’s care for her work stems from a love of relationships and intricacies, and when her work on the web or in the client meeting space is done, she is immersing herself in her local biosphere through observing, writing, divining, and creating art. You can explore this work at Eight of Pentacles.
Ashley is the newest TPJ parent and has extracted this bio between bouts of wall-washing as her daughter learns to eat solids.
* she absolutely was
Jon Mitchell, Publishing
Jon is a writer who learned HTML in the Angelfire days (that is, in middle school), and he’s been blogging in public since 2003. His whole pre-Tiger Pajamas career, if you had asked him what he did professionally, he would have said he was a writer. Jon left his last job in January of 2024, and as he considered what to do next, he realized it would have been more accurate all along to say, “I make websites.”
Jon has planned, built, and managed websites and publishing operations for clients large and small since 2013, but his client work landed him a couple in-house website jobs that lasted a few years each.
From 2021 until 2024, Jon was Correspondence & Publishing Manager for United States Senator Jon Ossoff. This entailed a great deal of writing and editing (and management), as he was responsible for the Herculean (read: Sisyphean) task of responding to all constituent mail, as well as handling the Senator’s personal correspondence. Jon rather enjoys writing letters, and email newsletters have also taken up quite a bit of his professional time as a result. But as a website guy through and through, the most significant part of the Senate job for Jon was overseeing the design, development, and deployment of ossoff.senate.gov and then managing its cross-departmental publishing operations.
From 2014 until 2019, Jon was Publisher at Burning Man Project. This also entailed a lot of writing and editing; he got this job by blogging about Burning Man from the outside, Burning Man’s head writer at the time brought him in-house, and Jon gradually took over editorial responsibilities for the official Burning Blog. Then the time came to redesign burningman.org for the first time in 11 years, and Jon got a real job overseeing the migration of all the content — about 4,000 pages’ worth. He did a good enough job with that redesign that he was given control of the redesign of the Burning Blog, which he renamed the Burning Man Journal to reflect its elevation from a basic reverse-chronological blog feed into a proper publication with multiple sections. That redesign has remained in place for a decade. Jon was also the publisher of the Jackrabbit Speaks, Burning Man’s 200,000-subscriber email newsletter, and was the hands on the keyboard writing first drafts of official communications from the Black Rock City event site.
Jon also has professional experience writing about technology. He was a staff writer for legendary outsider tech blog ReadWriteWeb from 2011 to 2013, and he covered Apple for Inside.com’s Inside Apple newsletter from 2019 to 2020. He’s been on staff with a few other wonderful little websites here and there, and all throughout he has worked with amazing clients including app developers, law firms, artists, congregations, and more to make them great websites.
Jon is a father of two daughters and husband to Rabbi Ariel Root Wolpe, whose website Jon also made. She is the founder of Ma’alot, their Jewish community in Atlanta, Georgia. She made that website, but Jon helps out with the trickier pages. Jon also has his own website where he writes about spirituality and householder life, and it will give you a good sense of what kinds of crazy websites Jon will make you if you really want to unleash the tiger.
Phil Giammattei, Engineering
Phil has been making websites for almost 20 years. He was initiated into a lifelong fascination with software when an older cousin left a C++ book out on a beach vacation at age eight. Phil quickly picked up the basics of rudimentary data structures and computer graphics, and before long he got to experience the magic of a program coming alive. He studied web development in college and fell in love with the faithful rigidity of HTML and the endless creative potential of CSS. His MySpace page, the links of which would blow up to layout-breaking size when hovered on, was an early career highlight.
Phil immersed himself deeply in Big Tech during the early 2010s, with stints at Apple, Google, and Oracle, but continued to freelance and hone his skills at making Just Regular Websites. In 2016 he took over web duties for KerfCase, a luxury E-Commerce company with a high-converting Shopify site, and further developed a keen touch for product marketing and visual design.
In the 2020s Phil started to explore Front-End frameworks, exploring the world of JavaScript-based tools like React, Angular, and Next.js for a variety of clients, and honing skills in static site generators like Gatsby, Eleventy, and Astro for smaller projects. Phil misses the early days of the internet, the untamed frontier where everyone was exploring the landscape, no one had figured out how to monetize anything, and everything was handcrafted by people. He participates in the thriving Indie Web scene on Mastodon, chatting with other web site enthusiasts on ways to bring some of that early magic to today’s Internet.
Phil lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, 3-year-old daughter, and two cats. Web development is a great time for him to put on headphones and listen to something that isn’t the Frozen soundtrack.
Phil works as a DevOps engineer for a large bank, providing expertise on scaled infrastructure and server clusters and things like that, but when he’s done for the day, he makes little web sites for himself and his friends. He blogs regularly from giammattei.co.