Breaking out of development.Dave Ashenden

A little about me.

•Senior Architect at Trigger

•International brands

•Bespoke solutions

•I like to ride down hills fast

•I’m from Devon

•I love to draw

So what do I do?

•Solutions Architecture

•User Experience

•Team Leadership & Mentoring

•Development in AS3, PHP, jQuery

•Making work enjoyable

Quite an ego...

Soo, breaking out...

•We as developers solve problems

•Where do we typically struggle?

•How can we solve them?

•Going beyond coding.

Feel free to ask questions

Common problems

•Unable to communicate with non-technical people

•Considered an afterthought in design led agencies

•80% of the work done is invisible - Magic Code.

•Production line mentality

•Kept away from clients

•Lacking design skills

•Made to wear a suit....

Understand your team

Understand your team

•What do they need to do there job?

•How can you help them achieve their goal?

•How can they help you achieve yours?

Everyone plays a part

Accounts & Management•Ensure that the work gets done, the clients

goals are met

•Convert ideas into revenue

•Understand the clients goals

•Good communicators

•Good organisers

Graphic design

•Think in terms of what they see, and how they feel.

•Their success is qualitative.

•Design work is visible.

Developers

•Construct the business logic - The magic under the hood.

•Building the HTML / Flash frontend

•Backend development

The in-between

•The glue of the solution.

•Understands the clients goals.

•Appreciates and supports the design rules.

•Supports the experience throughout their code.

•Uses language in context of their audience.

Attitude

Consider yourself a brand•Building a career is just like building a good

website / application / etc.

•Promote yourself as a solution not a skill set.

•Understand your market.

•Perception is crucial.

•Have plans for growth.

Be positive

•Nothing is worse than a grumpy developer

•You will end up in the server room

•Everyone has bad days

•Negativity doesn’t get things done

Believe in your company•If you are perceived to care about the

companies success you are more likely to be heard.

•You will be trusted with higher profile work.

•Promote your company and associate yourself with it.

Language

Language

•Development is complex.

•It has its own lingo

•We love to share the complexity

•It may as well be alien to most people

•Bing advert.

A typical example

Client / Account manager:

“I don’t want anyone to see my new site until its released, however I still want to see it. from home.”

Developer:

“I’ve added an .htaccess file with digest authentication to the site and locked down the ports. The password is a md5 hash of password.”

Language

•Only a developer knows what .htaccess, cache, 64MB mean

•The details of ‘how’ are normally irrelevant to a client.

•The client switches off.

•The developer gets frustrated about the client not caring about how cool their solution was.

Learn from your team

Client:

“I don’t want anyone to see my new site until its released, however I still want to see it. from home.”

Account Manager:

“We’ve added password protection to the site, to access it please enter the details below when prompted.”

Language

•Learn to summarise and simplify.

•Remove technology references unless relevant to the problem

•Think before you speak, pause for thought.

•Use analogies.

•Allow the other person to ask why.

Getting noticed

Study other disciplines

•Improves your communication

•Improves your work

Create a codebase

•Saves time - meaning more billable hours

•Allows you to distribute to other coders

Prototype ideas

•Create tests of technologies / ideas

•Removes risk and allows you to use it in projects

•Post it!

Skill swap

•Buddy up if you can

•Provides guided learning

•Two heads are better than one

Set yourself goals

•Where do you want to be in:

•next week

•next month

•next year

•5 years

Don’t be scared of the unknown•The web changes constantly

•Technologies evolve

•Mentalities evolve

•See it as a personal challenge

Sharing really is caring

•Delicious feeds

•Twitter

•Blog

•Internal feeds for projects

Pub projects

•Out of the work environment

•No constraints

•Throws up new challenges

Learn to problem solve over code snippets.•Understand the problem

•Get use to defining it

•Once you have a solution, then choose the technology that suits the problem

Communities & groups

•Go to events ( tick :D )

•Answer problems on forums, stack overflow etc.

•Join user groups,BCS.

•Help your social friends.

Beyond you

Identify Problems within your processes•Gaps in your processes cause mistakes

•Snagging points in a project.

•Blackholes for changes and amends

•I though he/she w`s doing it.

Play first

•Prototypes!

•Get the client engaged!

•They nearly always change their mind.

•Back fill the functionality

Task tracking

•Vortex of Doom

•For the love of god record everything.

•Provides an audit trail.

•Clients know where you are at

•Group into releases

•Jira, Bugzilla, Trac

Version Control

•Git, SVN, CVS

•Collaboration

•Ability to go back easily

Integrated DevelopmentEnvironments•Integration of:

•version control

•task management

•debug tools.

•Deployment

•Eclipse / Aptana

Mood walls

•A space that EXISTS

•Away from the brain drainer.

•Collaborative

•Idea Creation

Interviews

Do your research

•Know who the company are.

•Prepare questions.

•Draw comparisons to show understanding.

Be yourself

• Your personality and the way you think is crucial to how you fit into the current team.

•Its not a competition theres a fine line between knowing your stuff and arrogance.

Take something to show•Prototypes

•Articles you’ve written

•Shows your interest and passion

•Problem solving skills

•It doesnt have to be perfect!!!

Thanks!

dave@damonky.co.uk

www.damonky.co.uk