Meet the Unsplash Team: Olly Ash
10 Questions with Oliver Ash from the Unsplash Product Team
Who are you and what’s your role at Unsplash?
I’m Olly and I work on the web team—the team responsible for unsplash.com.
When did you join the team?
March 2017. In the tech industry that’s a long time. I think that shows how much I love working at Unsplash!
Where do you live?
I live with my partner, son and dog (English Setter) in a town called Rushden (Northamptonshire, England).
Where do you work?
I’ve worked from home for 6 years now. For a while, I worked from a co-working space which was great, but covid put a stop to all of that.
What does a regular day at Unsplash look like for you?
Code review. Pair/mob programming. Filing bugs and creating reduced test cases. Planning and communicating with other teams. I feel most productive when I’m doing something creative i.e. writing code to solve a problem, but as the team is growing in size it’s increasingly difficult to find the time to do that.
Who do you primarily work with on the team?
The web team (Thomas, Sam, Nim), Aaron, Kirill, Luke and Richie.
Why do you enjoy working on Unsplash?
Small team, big product.
I really believe in the co-founders (Luke, Mikael and Steph) and their vision, both for the product and also the culture of the company.
Everywhere I look, software is riddled with bugs—so I enjoy our focus on building software that’s resilient, whether that’s through functional programming or something else like progressive enhancement.
What is your favorite thing you worked on at Unsplash?
There are many things but the most enjoyable thing so far was the photo uploader. I wrote about it here. I’m not really proud of the code anymore but I still love how reliable it has been—we’ve never had any major bugs. The power of functional programming!
What’s something you’re working on now at Unsplash?
What tools do you use?
iTerm, lazygit, Chrome, VS Code, TypeScript, React
What do you like to listen to while you work?
Frank Turner, Will Varley, Kings of Convenience
What do you do when you aren’t working on Unsplash?
Being a dad, badminton, running and house renovations.
Describe yourself using 3 emojis
Where can people find you?
You can find me on Twitter.