Category: Working

30 days of blogging 

I’ve recently signed up for Marc Jenkins’ 30 Days Writing Challenge to improve my blogging output. I do like reading blog posts from developers who writing about their day to day working lives as well as technicial posts.

I’ve not really written many technicial posts, just because I don’t want to write something that is incorrect, but I do remember what Remy Sharp once said that he wrote a blog to remind him of something. So he could look back and be reminded of something he learnt. Great idea.

So Marc’s course starts soon I’m looking forward to the course and see what is involved.

It is fun to learn

I’ve just read Dan Davies article “It’s fun to learn” it’s a great article where he talks about how he is a self taught web developer and over the last year he has really pushed his jQuery skills building demo sites and projects. It’s a great post and well worth checking out.

While reading I was reminded about that initial fun you get when you start out learning new technologies. Like Dan I’m a self taught developer, who has picked up new skills as I’ve gone along. For me learning a new technology has recently felt like it’s something I have to do. For example as a contractor if I want to earn so much a day then I need to have a particular set of skills (not the set of skills that Liam Neeson has in Taken). Which has lead me to looking to pick up the next thing that is popular.

Really I have  a lot of experience and a good set of skills, and I could easily stick with what I know, but this leads to stagnation and a feeling that you are going nowhere in your career. This takes the fun out of the job.

Dan’s post has reminded me to not learn something cause it’s popular and may increase contract opportunities, but to learn something that I find fun. And the best way to learn a new technology is to build demo sites as Dan lists in his post.

For me I’ve recently been interested in NodeJS (yes I know it is very popular at the moment, but it’s something I want to learn). As a web developer I like the web frameworks that Node supports, the one I am interested in is ExpressJS. So that’s what I’m going to start learning and have fun doing it.

Distributed teams

Today I’ve been working from home, thankfully the client I’m working for sometimes allows me to do this if I need to. I was thinking about remote working and how it has changed and grown so much over the last few years.

Back when I started in the web industry many years ago, one of the first places I worked at had a small team for this web stuff, and eventually they went off on their own and I was asked if, as the junior developer, I’d like to go with them on their new adventure.

So for the first few weeks we as a team of three was a distributed team, each working from their homes. Back then all I had was a dial up, a old computer with a CRT (remember them), Dreamweaver and FTP. Whenever I need to talk to another member of the team, we’d email a time to talk. Then I’d unplug the telephone line from the computer, plug the phone in and speak to my team mate. This was about 14 years ago so mobiles were just coming out.

Now sitting here I have a laptop, wifi, Dropbox and Slack/Glitter all keeping me in touch with not only the other members of my team, but developers all over the world. I can sync all my changes through Dropbox, so when I’m back in the office I can check in to the build server, all the work I’ve done here.  Through things like Slack/Glitter I can speak to other developers on any project I have in Github.

In America it looks like the distributed team approach has really taken off. In the UK businesses are not as open to the idea, mainly established businesses are not keen on this model. New startups are looking at this approach, but being in a smaller country compared to the US, I think UK firms are still new to the distributed model, which is a shame because now it is some much easier to work this way. I’m sure top developers are put off by a role when they see how long the commute is, if more companies were open to this way of working then they might find the best developers for their team/project.