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Why learning web development at college is good for you
I constantly hear people complaining that they aren’t getting what they want out of college, that they can do it alone and that they don’t want to be taught ‘behind the times’ ASP and that their college needs to be brought into the ‘current day teaching techniques’ - so here’s why I think all that is a load of crap.
With your teacher(s), you will more than likely deal with the hardest client you’ll ever have
With my first web development project at college we had to develop a random concept web site into XHTML/CSS. I submitted a div tag/CSS layout and was promptly asked where I took the code from and why I was trying to cheat in my college class. To which I explained that I had been developing outside of college for some time prior to joining the course, which wasn’t met by believing eyes.
You see this type of interaction with a teacher is what teaches you the fundamentals of dealing with bad clients, bad contractors and bad customers. Do you blow your lid and call the teacher a fool? Or do you politely explain you’ve got x years experience playing with sites beforehand?
If the teacher has past experience running their own company or doing client projects then they’ll be even further of a problem to you. They’ll teach you how old fashioned some clients can be by being old fashioned themselves - why aren’t you using tables? Does this validate to HTML 4.0 standards? Why aren’t you including food costs in your client billing breakdown?
Learning ASP isn’t all that bad, especially if you are in it for the money
There’s more money in ASP and there’s more real jobs available. The type where you sit in a company and develop all day long. The language teaches you structure, and gives you a first hand view of what it is like on the other side of the fence should you be a PHP/Ruby on Rails type of guy. Why is it a bad thing to be able to start a PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument with ‘well I’ve worked with ASP before, and…’?
If you’re good, you’ll learn to teach
I spent a lot of my time helping out my friends with problems at college, my grades suffered but at the end of the day but I gained a good knowledge of what it is like to teach. Today this is applied to how I can teach clients about how Rolled’s process works, how we teach them Wordpress or basic XHTML for post formatting in their CMS.
At the end of the day I finished basic tasks in less than a minute, and spent the rest of the hour helping people out and learning from it - just because you’re finished with something doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do.
Presenting
I was useless at presenting when I first started on my college course, a nervous wreck when standing in front of the class. If your course includes presenting and you’re asking why - I honestly don’t know what you’re thinking.
The talent of being able to react to an incredibly tricky question from a teacher in front of 10-20 people and not look like an idiot is something of a secret that you can take to your grave. Putting passion into something you have no passion about when presenting is also another talent that few have, especially when it’s all put together the night before at 4am after getting in from a night out.
It teaches you how to place graphics, what fonts work and what don’t, how to present one idea but how to present another - and at the end of the day, it’s practice for pitching if you are to be in that position later on in life.
In conclusion
Stop whinging - stay in college and get your degree/diploma. College can teach you many things you wouldn’t learn outside of the boundaries until it’s too late. Do you want to present to a client having never done it before? Deal with a bad client for the first time on your newly acquired project? Have work go entirely dry and not have those Junior ASP programmer positions to apply to? Lose every PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument because you have no facts to use to back up your side of things?
At the end of the day it’s college, it’s not an experience many get more than twice for two to four years of their life. Suck it up, learn from it and experiment as much as possible whilst you can.
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Good Morning Nottingham
(Click the image to download the original 1.1mb image)Waking up at 8am this morning as my MacBook Pro blasted out the alarm I set after getting up just three hours earlier to check on the progress of a client project, I noticed one thing - Nottingham looks good today. The image above is around 40% of the view from the window directly in front of my desk as I sit fully moved into my new apartment in Marco Island.
As a side note after a disappointing re-launch of another popular site from my past, the Cubic Flow team have done an excellent job of their come back for the third time. The things their team produces excites me and I hope to see much more beautiful art and graphic design from them in the future like they produced with their first magazine release.
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BT Business support - worthy of a lawsuit
So around three weeks ago I signed documents and put down some of the deposit to hold my new apartment in Marco Island, located in the Nottingham City Centre. All utilities are automatically arranged for me besides my phone and broadband, and the apartment requires a BT phone line for every broadband provider, so I decided to just go with BT for the broadband and get it done with.
Customer experience one:
I go onto the website and look at the ‘total broadband’ residential package, it says it requires a phone line. I order a phone line on the website and go to order the ‘total broadband’ package, but it requires a phone number and an active line installed. Thankfully they have a helpline number for this sort of thing so I give it a ring.*Sixty minutes wait later*
“Sorry the Total Broadband package has to be ordered with a phone line at the same time through us, otherwise we can’t arrange it to be installed. You have to cancel your phone line in order to order the broadband”
“OK, so can you do that for me?”
“No we can’t, we only process orders here - I can forward you to the people responsible”
“OK”
Ninety minutes wait later - I hang up and decide to give the BT Business guys a ring and pay the extra for better support (very clearly advertised, as 24/7). To put it bluntly - the phone didn’t even ring, someone picked up and processed my order and within forty minutes I had a BT Business phone and broadband package ordered and my new business phone number. One tidbit I did learn from this call though - it takes three months to process a residential phone line order that is ordered on-line, so I wasn’t going to be hearing from those guys anytime soon.
So about two weeks ago my wireless in my current living arrangement goes missing in action, but only with my Mac’s. The Xbox 360 and all four PC’s in the house all work with the router, but all of a sudden both Mac’s (an iMac and a MacBook Pro, both the latest Intel models) can connect to the network but can’t get the internet from it. It’s now at a point where I can stand directly next to the router with my MacBook Pro and not see the wireless network. We tried everything, but ultimately the router isn’t giving any love to my Mac’s and everyone else gets the internet just fine, so it was time to move forward the moving in date for my new apartment along with that beautiful BT Business broadband and phone I had ordered.
I should mention here, that I tried out my newly acquired Nintendo Wii yesterday and that can’t get the internet from the router either.
Of course to do this, I would need to use my newly paid for BT Business support service to see if they could move forward the installation of my phone and broadband. Three hours later I learned:
- BT Business ‘after sales support’ doesn’t exist - there is no option 4, it just forwards to option 2, which is residential support.
- Residential support takes an average of 20-40 minutes to pick up and is always Indian
- Residential support gives you a nice constant ringing sound with an annoying computer telling you you’re in a queue and that they are ‘very busy’
- Business support has classical music whilst you are waiting, which is almost always under two minutes
- Every single department only has one thing they can do with a computer, to do something else they have to forward you to another department where you have to re-explain things all over again
- Half of the time you are forwarded to the wrong department
- If the computer asks you for a phone number to be put in and to go through the options, in ten minutes it *will* ask you to start all over again - whether you are ‘in a queue’ or not
- BT Business support doesn’t know that because you are a BT Business support customer you are forwarded to another section of the BT Business support team and for every particular extra task will gladly forward you to BT Residential support without even thinking about it half of the time.
- Of the thirteen people I spoke to during those three hours roughly eight or nine were residential support engineers, clearly defined by being Indian and having the ringing tone during the waiting time.
- The only way to get someone to put you ’straight through’ to the correct department or to get your problem sorted out, is to clearly point out in a agitated and clearly annoyed manner that you have just spoken to x amount of other people in the last x minutes/hours and you are ready to x someone’s x if they don’t help you soon
In the end my phone installation has been moved forward from Thursday to Monday, but the broadband can’t be moved what so ever. So here’s praying that there’s a BT OpenZone network or - god help us - an open network for me to use for that week until BT comes along to install things.
In closing, BT’s Business support is terrible and is too merged with the residential support to make any slight bit of difference to my support needs in this situation. Their Indian support is just as terrible as everyone else (Virgin/NTL for example) - though it is free and not a 0845 number. That said, in other situations BT Business support do have direct lines that aren’t merged with residential support and hopefully I’ll never have to lose another three hours of my life like that again.
Update:
I’m into the new apartment, the BT Business hub arrived before I moved in so I picked it up and plugged in for fun ready for when they come to activate the lines etc. It’s Saturday and my Internet isn’t supposed to be put in until Thursday - but here I am, accessing it via the ethernet point whilst the hub is connected to the ADSL line.Update two:
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The phone installation guy says they normally activate lines up to 3-4 days in advance of ‘installing’ the broadband at the exchange. So I was lucky enough to get it put through early and have it installed 6 days early. -
New Rolled At teaser page, new direction
Today we have a new teaser page for Rolled At with some more information on our offered services upon launch, a view of our logo and something with a much needed designer touch on top of the original done by myself.
The next launch of ours will be the official blog where we can finally start talking about our clients and where staff can post up articles in their given area. We will also have special offers now and again whilst talking about our client and product launches of which we have some very special things to say. It will also give us somewhere to post up some progress on the actual site.
We are also actively seeking more PHP/mySQL developers who love what they do, and will be seeking Flash developers in the near future. Again - the blog will allow us to advertise these openings properly.
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Oh Sky Sports, how I love your web team
I’m looking at my RSS reader today and up pops up “Premier League live on Sky - Sky Sports have confirmed their first live Premier League games for the 2007-08 season.”
Excited I go to read, only to see this:
And the list of fixtures announced after a small gap:
Copy goes in here, cope goes in here, copy goes in here. Copy goes in here, cope goes in here, copy goes in here.
They know just how to make a web developer laugh. So here’s to Sky Sports, may you continue your excellent online coverage of sports!
Update: More fixtures without names have appeared, whilst ‘copy goes in here’ appears another 10 more times too.
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Twitter out, Pownce in
I’ve replaced my Twitter with Pownce on the left hand side bar quickly this morning. The reason being that I find Pownce much more social and interactive than Twitter is, and everyone on my Twitter is already on Pownce - so I’ve moved to the better service basically.
Anyone can feel free to add me at my Pownce page: http://www.pownce.com/jhuskisson/ and I will add anyone that adds me. Think of it as a micro-blogging platform with some private entries for only friends.
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My-Tuts could have been killer
Seems Nick killed it with his lack of maturity and dedication. Maybe I’ll have to revisit the scene one last time.
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A few Basecamp gripes
I’ve been using Basecamp a lot to organise all the projects across Rolled At and here are a few of my gripes with the web app. Don’t get me wrong - it’s close to perfect, but there are things that bug me about it.
1. Remember me!
Why doesn’t it forward me from the log-in form if I’m already logged in?
2. Backpack has a better calendar
I want to be able to set events, not milestones. I don’t want to have to tick off a milestone when staff member X comes back from holiday - it should just happen.
3. Why are write boards and the chat still separate?
It’s a separate product, we know that, but why is it kept separate on the product that is the overall offering of all the products offered by 37 Signals? I’d certainly be annoyed if the to-do lists where still kept separate like this. I feel it removes from the overall together product by keeping these separate, especially in terms of making it feel like it’s a single product.
4. No education in Textile
I feel this is the only part of Basecamp we as users have to teach our clients and people we invite in to use the system with us. The helpful small guide that was there a while back has been removed, luckily there’s guides out there on the internet but it would be nice if users had the chance to know that Textile was being used, and have a quick guide on how to use it available.
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Qualities of a great freelancer
The following are qualities that I consider core things I look for in freelancers I use when outsourcing work and getting things done. They are also the things that each and every freelancer working on jobs for Rolled At possess.
Personality
You may remember the guy who bored you to death on the phone, but you’ll remember the one you related to and laughed with a whole lot more. They’ll also become a pleasure to work with and you’ll use them more often. I can’t tell you how put off I am by the lack of a personality in some freelancers I talk to.
A love for the job
Clients don’t want their leg humping, but they do want someone who wants to do the job they have available. Someone who wants to see the product of their work come alive at the end of everything.
Chances are if you don’t love making websites, the ones you’ll be creating won’t be very good once your finished. The first question I ask anyone when I talk to them the first time when I’m adding a freelancer to my list is ‘do you love what you do?’ and if the answer isn’t yes with a convincing follow up statement then they don’t last passed that first question.
Patience
Can you wait for a job or are you going to be asking me every day about it? Are you going to blow off a huge list of insults at a client when they merely suggest a small change? Patience in my mind, is something that every freelancer needs in order to be a freelancer. You need to be patient in order to wait for a client getting back to you, to hear back from a job follow up and patient with your work too. If your forever complaining that something is going wrong instead of simply looking for a solution then your going to be closing doors instead of opening them.
Flexibility
Don’t work with frameworks? Someone else’s code? Pre-built scripts? Other people’s CSS/XHTML? These are all basic examples of lack of flexibility in some areas. Whilst they aren’t vital ingredients of a web development freelancer they do effect your ability to get work if you aren’t a specialist or established.
A speciality
The freelancer who specialises in one area and becomes a guru is someone that can - providing the speciality is of importance - become a cornerstone of a business. A talent in one area can be what gets you hired over someone else for a particular job, and it can be something that allows you to make more money that someone who generalises over multiple areas of knowledge. They do a better job, they have more experience and in most cases they take less time to get things done.
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R.I.P. Tutorialized
Tutorialized was an inspiration of mine when I started out on the internet with Pixel2life and I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Kurt directly since leaving (after years of seeing him as an unapproachable figure, it’s strange). Whilst I’m not still directly involved with the tutorial community I do hear a lot of things about it. I still get a lot of the complaints and the news bulletins I got from people two years ago, so I’m almost up-to-date with everything that goes on. I heard this from Kurt himself, and on the 19th of May Kurt announced that Tutorialized (the number one tutorial listing on the internet) had been sold, the new owner being Developer Shed.
Unfortunately Developer Shed have taken over the site and it is dead upon their arrival. With seven advertising spots (three to four advertising the same thing at any one time), two implementations of the ‘White Papers’ service and with a couple of search boxes added by Developer Shed, it’s no wonder I’m hearing so many complaints about the site after they have taken it over.
It’s sad to see another of the great tutorial sites fall from the grace of the audience that held it so highly in regard. But I’d like to congratulate Kurt on the money he made from the sale as I don’t think anyone can doubt that he deserves every single penny of the money he received for building what was the best tutorial listing web site on the internet and something I held very high respect for until Developer Shed left their mark.
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