Monday, October 19, 2009

Business certainly is business

This is a rant about those of you doing web development. In particular those of "US" who code more then we design and like to work with others that do the design part. I'm sure there are a good number of you out there that are aware of what I'm talking. I'm also sure that fewer of you are fully aware to the fullest degree of just how much pain this can entail.

In my particular case, the issue has everything to do with being unequally yoked. LOL. I, the developer code geek type guy (yeah, right) working with someone that is a designer first, and in spite of whatever he claims to be after that, is still a designer. Now that by itself may not be such a bad thing, but we're not talking about "by itself here". We're talking about a semi-official business partnership where the result of our work is money right?

So let me just get straight to the heart of this issue. This guy doesn't know enough about anything to call himself a web developer or web designer. He just isn't . He can make some pretty pictures. I'll certainly give him that, but the buck stops hard right there.

You know what, I'm just just going to create a list of things that suck.


  • Knowing Dreamweaver DOES NOT MAKE YOU A WEB DEVELOPER!!!!!! This is by far the most important thing on this list. Positioning in this case is important.

  • You don't start work until the specs and design are set in stone! Doing otherwise is nothing short of lunacy.

  • The client has no business being able to screw around with stuff while you are building it. None whatsoever. All this does is send the signal to noise ratio through the roof.

  • Nobody works on the code while the developer is building it. Doing so is, yup, you guessed it. Lunacy!

  • Programmers DON'T TASK SWITCH!!!!! Expecting them to do so shows ignorance and a general lack of experience.

  • If you made the design, YOU FIX IT!! Don't expect me or any other programmer that knows better to come back and try to dig through that Dreamweaver crap. It's your creation. Handle it!

  • And don't ever try to tell a programmer how long things should take. For those of you out there that think web sites take two weeks, pull your head out of your arse. It's clear that you don't know enough to realize that you don't know enough. Those sites that have been thrown up in two weeks, all smelly and stuff, are based on huge, slow, kludges called frameworks. Very difficult to extend and they don't scale well. You won't find one site out there that is doing significant traffic and relying on crap like Joomla. And when I say "significant", I'm referring to sites that are running load balanced and fault tolerant clusters.



Moral of the story kids? Always make sure you are dead certain what you're getting in bed with.


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