This is a tale of 2 web developers. ‘Jim’ and ‘Johnny’. They are both mid level developers looking for a job. Both are technically able and have bachelors degrees in computer science from similar schools. You have interviewed them, and while either should be a decent fit for the position you have, they are decidedly different.

Johnny has a great pedigree. He’s been hacking around the internet since grammar school, and he has a a stellar GPA. He has dabbled with many programming languages, ASP, Perl, to PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails. He has worked at some great companies as part of a team on some great projects. He knows every acronym, and every design methodology there is.

Jim on the other hand has worked in less programming languages. He is extremely efficient in one language, and has dabbled in one or two others. He has stayed at 2 companies for the course of his career. He worked on a small team where he had to wear many hats. His grades were above average, but not a 4.0. Most projects he did work on are still running on a high traffic site, with many concurrent users, and are quite stable.

So who do you hire? On the surface johnny is a superstar. He is going to give you perfectly architected code written in the perfect language every time. He would be the ultimate generalist which I am a fan of. He can talk to talk to clients, telling wild tales of working on cutting edge XML feeds with the brightest minds at the time. So Johnny is the right choice, no?

I would not hire Johnny. Johnny is a tech snob. When you really think about his resume what has he done? He doesn’t really have a large scale stable project under his belt. I would fear Johnny’s ability to talk to clients without talking down to them, and possibly the same for his team. In my experience the tech snobs of the world would rather work on picking a language and designing the code than actually getting a project to completion. They are enamored with the idea of the ‘correct way’ to design a project rather than the practical way. Practical is not always pretty but it works. It gets projects done and leaves room for future improvement. That is the hard part, getting code to completion. The real effective developer buckles down and writes good clean code.

Does Jim know how to write good stable code? Can he work with new technologies, and learn quickly? Of course. His education and experience to date show exactly that. Too often tech snobs serve as nothing but a distraction to tech teams, and are better off doing R&D or on a large team. But for a small agile team that is looking to be effective, picking a Jim turns out to be the pragmatic and correct decision 99% of the time.

I don’t need my developers to know everything. They need to grow, and be able to tackle new obstacles. If all they did was bounce from idea to idea, their knowledge would be too superficial to be of much use.
Maybe you disagree, I’d love to know your thoughts.

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Yahoo! GeoCities is closing. This is in interesting story for a few reasons. Mainly it signifies the end of the model of offering free sites to users with simple advertising money for the host. Now sites are usually a part of a bundle with other services, like premium email.

Those who are looking for free sites usually have more of a specific need for it. Want a social network, use ning. People create their own blogs on Blogger or WordPress. Even the GeoCities need for simple ‘about me’ type sites have been replaced by MySpace and Facebook.

As second reason I find this interesting, is I once had a GeoCities page. It was an open forum called the “Bored Board”. I was lazy so I simply setup the GeoCities “guestbook” feature. Remember those? Instead of “sign my guestbook”, I placed some text at top saying, “Feeling bored? Post as link, start a conversation, or just read.” It really caught on. It was so simple, but people found it addictive. It ended up being a long stream of mini posts, where you checked in to see what was up with this group of people. In fact it was basically your wall in Facebook, or a Twitter stream. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of Facebook, there were no XML feeds (this was 1997), but it was cool.

So today I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Yes GeoCities quickly became a joke with its bizarre ads, and lame URLs. But it did last. I wasted a lot of my 10 monthly AOL hours on GeoCities sites and had I fostered the idea, who knows, maybe I could have grown it into Facebook.
Did anyone have a GeoCities site, or maybe you still do? That would be cool in a retro way.

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As a web developer you make a product (the website or application) usually for consumers other than yourself. It could be for fellow employees on an intranet, the general public, or some mixture. Because you are creating products for others, you need to code for so many possibilities, especially the least expected. When you deploy code you have to test and monitor error logs to see how your product is being used in the ‘real world’. And 90% of the time, when developers find out how their product is being used they are amazed.

To this day I watch usability test videos in astonishment. I want to yell at the video like it was a bad horror movie. “Don’t go in there, the navigation is over on top!” or “Use the search, its right in front of you.” “The back button? C’mon why are you using the back button, you are going to lose your data, we GAVE you buttons for that.” You get the point. We need to be prepared for almost anything. This is one of the challenges in our field that makes it interesting – or could give us ulcers. I was thinking today, do other creators of other products face the same issues?

When someone designs a new car, does he have to worry users will not use the gas pedal correctly?
When you make a jacket, are you supposed to make it wearable both the correct way and for the chance a person puts it on upside down?
When you make a TV, you know people are expected to use it in basically the same manner.

Even if something is used wrong, manufacturers don’t care. Try swimming with your phone and then bring it back to the store. Or call Dell and tell them your laptop stopped working because you used it as roasting pan for your Easter ham. Rear-end another car while driving and explain to the cop you didn’t notice you had a brake pedal.

They don’t care. So why do we have to?

Imagine a world where we could simply say, “Sorry you didn’t use the back button as I intended, so I don’t care that you couldn’t get those Britney Spears tickets you had in your shopping cart.” “No sir, I put that in the navigation, so you are wrong for trying the search box.” These statements would be absurd in our world.

Maybe we just care too much. Maybe we have to because its so easy to go to another website if the current one doesn’t suit your needs. Or, maybe the solution is users need to get a license before they jump on the internet, like driving a car. Then we could have a DMV for internet licenses. Imagine the people who would work there. That would be interesting. Thoughts?

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If you are reading my blog, there is a very good chance you are interested in the web, web development, or technology management. Today I want to talk about something I have learned more about since I started writing this blog. Its not something completely new to me, but it has become very clear since I started writing Effective Development. That is, most of the people on the web are not like us. Now you are going to say that’s obvious, and maybe you are inclined to stop reading. But read on, I want to talk about why this it is important to us as developers and managers of developers.

This blog is a tech blog. That implies that besides some of my friends and family who may be reading this from time to time to be nice and help my traffic, most of you are technical. So one would think, a large percentage of readers who are interested in this site would naturally subscribe to my RSS feed or Twitter, or one of the other ways of following updates on the site. This is not an arrogance thing. I do not assume everyone wants to come back and read all my updates, but my traffic numbers prove repeat users do come back. 50.4% of my readers are repeat readers. They read 2.41 articles and spend over 3 minutes on the site before leaving. So these numbers say people are interested on some level. Personally, when I am interested in a site and I want to consume the content, I always add the RSS feed to my reader. Then I visit the site when new posts come out, or read the full article in my reader if available.

So naturally this assumption I have about users means you all are using RSS, right? No, not the case at all. In fact, very few people are using RSS, and in the survey I ran a few weeks ago, only 15% of users say they subscribe to the RSS feed.

Why is this important?
Well its important, because if readers to a tech blog are not all using RSS and Twitter, what about users for a site geared for the general public? As developers we need to keep this in mind. Sure we want to always work on the newest widget, and the latest UI function. But we cant always do this, nor do we need to.
I have worked on projects where we spent 20+ hours on a nifty widget for our homepage. We were very proud of all the customization, movement, and dynamic asynchronous data it provided. Finally it was time to launch the widget. When we did, we received emails asking for navigation the the exact tool we just built the widget for. We scratched our heads. It was right there on the homepage, and it looks cool, and it has so many nice features, why couldn’t everyone see it? We had spent so many hours giving users features that we thought would keep them from needing to visit the actual tool as often. And here they were asking for the tool still. So, we made it even more prominent, and simplified it. We added help text and finally people started using it. Now we were really proud, people could see it and they would soon love it we felt. So we added some Google event tracking to monitor all the interactions users were having with our widget. We waited a few weeks, then checked the data. Boy, were we surprised. Sure people had found it and were now using it. That problem was solved, but you will never believe what people were using it for. Basically they used this many featured widget as a login/navigation to the tool it was meant to supplement.

We had spent a lot of time working on a fancy navigation element to another area of the site. Now this wasn’t a total waste, as the technologies we used and the development time invested has turned out to be re-used in even more areas of our site. It was a learning experience for the developer team (and management), and a good technology investment for our team and site. It just wasn’t the drop dead feature we had hoped it would be.

There are lessons to be had here. First, know your audience. Really know your audience, don’t just assume you know them. That means run analytics and keep an eye on users behavior on your site. Run usability tests (a topic i will cover in the future), and keep your users in mind. After the research is in decide if the feature is worth the development and time. You may still decide to build a feature because as i said earlier, it may be a technological investment for your future. Perhaps you decide to build the feature becasue you can monetize it in some way. Your users may not be clamoring for a RSS feed widget, but your sponsors may be, etc…

Remember our view of the web and our users is not always accurate. You have to truly put yourself in their place through testing and analysis. If you learn to make project decisions based on the research, you will certainly be more effective, both in development and implementation.

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What is it about April Fools Day and the tech world? The world of tech news has adopted April 1 as its unofficial holiday. A day to write (sometimes) creative and absurd technology news stories. I will not go into specifics here, you can find many roundups of the day’s stories with a simple search. I personally am not a fan of this. I consume a lot of sites’ content in the course of a day through browsing, RSS, podcasts, etc… I found that at least 50% of the items in my RSS feed yesterday were bogus stories.

You are probably thinking I’m just pissed because I fell for a few fake stories. This really isn’t the case (this year). Even if I did, this isn’t my gripe. I find it a waste of time. I get that writing a story about Amazon’s next generation of cloud computing will actually be a server farm circulating the world in a blimp is geeky and humorous. But to have been drawn to a story on the amazon blog called “Up, Up, and Away – Cloud Computing Reaches for the Sky“, to find out its about servers in blimps is annoying. Yes this is the point of April fools, but again to have wasted 50% of my content reading time on fake entries is just ridiculous. Personally, I didn’t even find it very funny or creative.

And its not just April 1st anymore. Since the tech world has caught on, and almost everything is fake on 4/1, writers and tech geeks are starting earlier and earlier. Last year there were stories circulating a few days early, this year, April Fools came almost 2 weeks early on twitter. Again, I don’t see the point.

I get it, we are a creative bunch in the tech field. Technology is so foreign to many, these stories that seem ridiculous to some are going to be believable to others. I know plenty of people who would think cloud computing refers to servers in blimps, or some other lofty location. Having a creative outlet and practical jokes is again, not my issue. Its more about consistently wasting time reading and getting halfway through a story before it falls flat and turns out to be a joke. So I have come to this conclusion. I have decided that I will take a break from the tech world on April Fools Day. From now on, I plan to simply mark all my RSS feeds as read, and just skip all content on 4/1. It’s only one day, and I could use the vacation from technology anyway. Maybe I’ll work on some office pranks instead.

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For years, SmartMoney had project manager(s).  This was more of a necessity during our early years, when projects were large 9-12+ month long beasts.  Our projects were managed in a more classical software development approach commonly used at the time. Projects had weekly status meetings, pages of specs and documents that were always in need of updates. In other words, projects had a lot of busy work.

Those days are over. Projects are now smaller and more iterative. Because of this change, I feel instead of a traditional project manager the web now needs product managers.  In this role, the product manager is someone who works for the side of the product itself.  They do not simply setup meetings and coordinate between groups, rather they are knowledgeable in the web and the product being developed.

A product manager may be a technical generalist. They are familiar with modern usability requirements, and testing  They know SEO, web analytics, and know how to monitor a products successes and failures.  If it is a larger sized project or product, they should also become that products evangelist.  They are responsible for getting a product marketed and featured to ensure its successes. They are involved in developing a complete strategy for the product. This means they are not only responsible for getting the project to completion, they play a large role in monitoring and making the product succeed. Now this doesn’t mean they would be marketing geniuses also. In many companies it simply means they would coordinate with the correct marketing resources to help the product succeed.

This is a very important but overlooked role in technology.  With teams getting leaner and more agile, developers are usually not able or available to monitor a project’s success once deployed.  At SmartMoney, we move onto the next iteration or project almost immediately after deployment (usually simultaneously).  Beyond monitoring the errors and making sure a product physically runs, the development team does not often watch how it performs, or if users are having difficulties.  We rely on usability testing and user feedback through email and customer service to tell us how a product is being received in the real world. A product manager would be able to analyze the usability, and determine what features or areas need a second round of design and implementation.

Some companies may have dedicated SEO, analytics, usability, and marketing departments.  I find this rarely works.  This generates a lot of reports and emails that get passed around but never looked at. Passing around reports creates an illusion of agreement. Just because you create and send a report to 5+ managers, that doesn’t mean people really agree to its contents. But because of the inevitable lack of feedback, the sender usually feels that no response implies consensus. One good hardworking generalist who understands the web and the product you are creating, who is in direct contact with your technology teams is worth more than many departments of specialists to me.   If you don’t have this person where you work, consider retraining someone who shows an aptitude towards these talents.  As you move towards more iterative projects, you will find this position really fits in with the overall success of effective development methodologies.

Joel on Software has a great article on this topic, which he describes a similar role he calls program manager: How to be a Program Manager. Its not exact as he talks about the role in traditional desktop software development mostly, but a lot of principles apply.

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The blog has been live for about one month. I feel its going well (traffic is increasing), so I wondering what would you like to see in the blog to add more value to you?
I am posting a very short (anonymous) survey to get some feedback, and see what might add more value for you as a reader of Effective Development.
Please feel free to add comments and let me know if you would like to see some changes, or more or less of something in particular. Also, I noticed the comments required a WordPress login. I changed that, so now you no longer need to register to post.
Thanks,
Bill

Thank you for your help, the survey is now closed

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I read this quote today “If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.”  I tried to find the source, and it varies, but it seems to be most often accredited to ex-football coach Lou Holtz.  While it may have originated in sports, it also has a place in management and development.  If you learned something new yesterday, learn more about it today.  If you fixed a bug, or deployed a great feature, move on to the next thing.  If you look back at your past wins/achievements, and they still seem big to you, you really haven’t grown much.

Here is the pragmatic reality of work.  Most of us do not work for ourselves.  Even the self-employed work for their customers and clients.   Whether its our customers, clients, employers, or bosses; they all demand more and more from us.   There is nothing wrong with that, because achievements make money and foster growth.  In fact, you should demand the same of yourself.  Don’t rest on your past achievements in business or in work, move forward, and make new gains.  Everything skill you gain, every achievement you earn is yours to keep no matter what pushed you to do it.

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