Hello
My name is Jake Ratliff, and I live and work in North Carolina. Thanks for taking the time to visit my site 🙂
My Work
I’ve worked in the digital marketing industry since early 2012. I started out as an SEO analyst and then did pay-per-click advertising for a few years before returning to SEO.
I was interested in the feedback-rich workflow of PPC, where one seemingly tiny change could reverberate through an ad account. I enjoyed managing those ecosystems of data. I also learned a lot about analytics, and how to create events/conversions for tracking.
It was also during that time, around 2014, I learned Javascript1 in order to automate my ad campaigns.
Building programs to solve real life work problems was crucial to my growth in this industry. Once I felt like a Javascript Jedi (in fact I was not) I began full-stack web application development as a hobby, using Node.js in the backend.
The process of building websites gave me a deeper understanding of all the things that make them tick. I began to see websites as information environments instead of a collection of landing pages, and became interested in how site architecture and templating can be leveraged for organic wins. While I enjoyed pay-per-click and learned a lot about keyword research, this more holistic understanding of websites led me to transition back into the SEO field.
Along the way I began developing in Python, primarily for automation, data collection (usually public HTML and APIs), and data parsing.
I learned Python in a fraction of the time I learned Javascript. I owe that in part to the fact that I already knew what to look for, being my second language, but also to Python’s syntactic clarity.
I have to imagine that the way I was using Python also was a factor. I wasn’t trying to make a few perfect things, but a lot of okay things: skill comes from iteration.
The results of my programmatic data work, all done in Python (with occasional Javascript execution as needed for interaction), has been featured in Travel & Leisure, Business Insider, AskMen, and CNBC.
I’ve written bots that live in Twitter, GroupMe, and elsewhere. I’ve published two Chrome extensions (URList and wikiPic). My website Quizzly.co was a finalist for Joyent’s Node and Docker Innovation Award in 2016.
Places I go on the Internet
Let’s connect on:
Here’s my duke.edu page: https://sites.duke.edu/jakeratliff/
Daisy
This little pup has brought me so much joy over the past 9 years.
