I first heard about this over at the Brooklyn Creative League, and I’m digging this collaborative tech for project management. It’s crazy cheap ($3 a year for 3 minigroups and a gig of storage) and looks very straightforward. It’s so inexpensive I’d consider it for non-work web collaboration with friends out of NYC.
On Friday a Kotaku forum member leaked what looks like a legit orientation manual for new employees at Valve, the gaming company behind Half Life, Portal and the Steam network.
Anyone who works at a technical firm should check this out. There’s a lot of philosophies here that are really smart. For instance, keeping a flat corporate hierarchy:
Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.
Or on working sensible hours:
While people occasionally choose to push themselves to
work some extra hours at times when something big is
going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you’re looking around wondering why people aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.
Developer Dan Shipper:
When a non-technical person attempts to estimate software development time they come armed with their two basic heuristics: complexity based on size and complexity based on speed. But what they don’t realize is that software is different. Software is by nature not physical. It exists in the ether. A tiny portion of it shows up on our computer screens from time to time. Because of this when it comes to building web apps (or any type of software for that matter) our basic heuristics break down.
So many tech articles include a throwaway sentence on how developers aren’t good estimators of their work time. Rarely do they go further into the why behind that statement, but Dan’s does, and does so effectively. (via Watts Martin)
Interesting Times article yesterday detailing the two Instagram founders during the initial stages of their startup:
The two men began working out of Dogpatch Labs, housed in an old pier, with fishing nets on the walls and long tables that functioned as shared office space for aspiring tech companies. Julian Green, who briefly worked out of Dogpatch, recalled that the two men were unusually obsessed with design detail. Once, he said, they spent two hours perfecting the rounded corners of the app’s icons.
And two years and a billion dollars later, look where it got them. Engaging your users through great design matters. Small details, like the rounded corners of an icon, are part of this.
Laurie Segall, CNN:
Johnnie Manzari, a prominent user interface designer for more than a decade, says he gets weekly phone calls from people asking him to recommend good designers.
“There’s a huge demand for finding talent,” he says. “Just like with engineering, one of the reasons it’s been so difficult is there just aren’t many people that are that good. Not only are people looking for designers more than they used to, but the bar they’re willing to accept has gone up.”
Several of the industry’s power players have been on design-focused shopping sprees.
This whole article reeks of being about six months to a year behind coverage in tech news sites like Engadget and Hacker News. Many traditional “engineering heavy” companies, most notably Google and Dropbox, have seen their design focus ramp sharply upward as soon as early 2011. Around then or by that summer, there were a lot of websites and apps that saw a serious bump in usability and their aesthetic quality.
I’d argue a interesting issue, largely sidestepped by CNN, is why design salaries still don’t equalize that of developers, at least in more entry level positions. It’s a hard nut to crack, yet I find the disparity, given design’s (much deserved) increasing prominence in tech land, increasingly difficult to justify.
Programmer James Hague:
When I sit down to work on a personal project at home, it’s much simpler. I don’t have to follow the familiar standards of whatever kind of app I’m building. I don’t have to use an existing application as a model. I can disregard history. I can develop solutions without people saying "That’s not how it’s supposed to work!"
That freedom is huge.
Having recently knocked out some side projects of my own recently, James really hits it on the head. If you’re a developer and don’t have the time space to go off and run with your own thing on your own time, you’re missing a big growth opportunity.
Web development is constantly evolving, rewarding those that learn and adapt; developers that cling to older methods do so at their own risk. Yet the industry’s heavy workload and tight deadlines place many in a paradoxical situation: Due to their proven and familiar status, older techniques and programs often stay at the forefront of a developer’s workflow.
So how does a web developer learn and evolve while still making their deadlines? Having been in the industry for nine years, recently shifting into a position where I’ll be mentoring junior developers more often, I’ve been reflecting on that question a lot.
An interesting paradox became apparent months ago at the office: As I got better organized and more focused on my projects, breaks between the action became increasingly messy and unsatisfying. While I’ve always liked to stay abreast of the latest news from RSS and Twitter, given the sheer volume of content available combined with little free time during the work day, it’s rare I ended up digesting anything of substance.
Yet, more recently, I had a revelation: Given the distractions and tribulations of the modern workplace, why bother with the rush? I now file everything away in a simple yet organized manner, going back to the content later in the day when I have time to process it at a more relaxed pace. It’s led to less stress in the office and I’m able to better enjoy the various articles, videos and other assorted content I find.
Below, the details on my workflow that I’ve broken down into two sections, gathering and processing.
For anyone looking for a way to manage their time better and stay focused in the office, all it can take are a few simple rules, a timer and 25 minutes. That’s the idea behind The Pomodoro Technique, a dead simple concept that’s made a noticeable change for the better in my day to day workflow.
Like many, my normal “plugged in” work environment is filled with distraction; Emails, instant messenger and questions from coworkers often compete with my attention on the task at hand. To stay focused I’ve tried many different productivity techniques with little success. Getting Things Done, one of the most popular productivity techniques among tech circles, never really clicked; the startup work and the perceived day to day complexity were a stumbling block. I struggled with how to fully organize my projects list, and clearing off my inbox of actionable items was a chore that took longer than I wanted.