Trey Connell

I purchased the annual subscription to peepcode.com which gives me access to all screencasts and PDF eBooks they offer for one year. If they add new material after I purchased, I still get access to it – as long as my 1-year subscription hasn’t expired. I’ve found the screencasts to be of great quality and very helpful for introducing me to new concepts, languages, and tools. It’s really nice to sit back with a cup of joe and watch an instructor sometimes, and these guys do a great job.

The Pragmatic Programmers write some of the best development books out there. The great news is now they offer everything in electronic format – including PDF, .epub (eBook), and .mobi (mobile version). At an average cost of around $24 for all 3 electronic versions, these books are a steal. Also, there is no DRM and the Pragmatic Programmers site states that you are free to distribute the files to other members of your team. I purchased around 10 books and simply placed them in a secure location for our team to download.

All in, I spent about $400 for a wealth of knowledge and portable information that I can distribute to our team. That’s hard to beat when you’re trying to continue and encourage the growth of your employees but the economy is telling you to take a hike.

As creative and talented people, web designers and developers sometimes get into a funk – usually called “burn out”. I believe much of that funk can be attributed to their ever-dwindling patience with the very people they are there to serve – the customers.

It doesn’t matter if that customer is internal or external to your organization. Your job as a creative is to articulate the value of what you are proposing. And not only that, you also have to describe the process you’re going to follow in order for both you and your customer to achieve success. Finally, you have to make the sale and convince them to pay your price. That could be the internal time frame you need or real greenbacks. Sounds straightforward right? Well, it’s not.

I believe much of our frustration comes from customers who think they already know how it should be done, what’s involved, and ultimately devalue our contribution to the project. How many times have you had a customer deliver a document describing what they want on the home page of their site only to then have them turn around and say designing that home page should only take a few days because they’ve “practically done all the work already”.

What about when you build a new feature that does X but then the customer decides they want it to do Y. It’s all fun and games until the customer then asks you to revert back to X. Furthermore they think because X was already built, it’s basically like simply changing lanes on a highway or making a U-turn. “You should be able to have X back in place this afternoon right”? Slow down sparky.

Now it’s your job to explain how that code was branched a long, long time ago and you’ll have to merge it back into the product months later when 9,000 other things have been added since then. Then you’re going to have to run your testing routines and possibly do manual regression tests on the entire system to ensure you haven’t borked everything. Then THEY are going to need to test it and approve it for production launch because their idea of X 3 months ago is probably not going to be what they think X should be today. As you know, the list of details goes on and ultimately you spend 8 hours putting something in place that the customer thinks should have taken 15 minutes.

Circling to my original point, if you can’t properly and effectively communicate what you are doing, why you have to do it, the processes involved, and WHY YOU KNOW BEST AS THE EXPERT ON THE PROJECT then you’re setting yourself up for some major frustration. In my experience, customers just don’t know what they don’t know. If you take the time to explain it to them and justify what you already know is the correct approach, you’ll find your working relationship with them will improve and they will start to question less and move forward more.

I’ve been using a free GTD system called Tracks for about a month now.  From their web site:

Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL.

So far I’m really diggin’ it. I installed it on an Ubuntu server in my office so I can always access it from my laptops or my iPhone. The application is very, very straightforward and does a good job of giving me the tools I need and none of the tools that I don’t. The mobile version (included) is also implemented very well, allowing you to enter tasks and projects quickly from your phone.

If you’ve been looking for a simple task management system you can run locally and access from many devices, Tracks might just be for you.

I’ve recently started using Mind Maps to organize my thoughts and to plan out features of a project or site.  In case any of you are interested, the best Mac software I’ve found is XMind.  It’s completely free, very intuitive, and makes some really good looking mind maps.

My first project using mind maps is to describe the features and plugins we want to have in the next iteration of our company’s Core product.  I really think this is going to help all of us understand what we’re building and how it all fits together.

My father sent this article to me that was circulated within his company. In the article, Patrick Lencioni talks about managing teams virtually and the challenges inherent to being spread across the country or the world.

Given that I work at a virtual company, I found the article to be spot-on, but I thought Mr. Lencioni may have missed what I’ve found to be the biggest challenge as a manager of virtual employees all over the country.  That is – everyone must understand the direction of the company, the current state of the company, and how they fit into the overall scheme of the company.  

The key is to keep employees excited and energized so that you get the most you can from them each and every day.  That’s a huge challenge in a virtual environment.

Do you work in a virtual environment? What challenges do you or your team face?

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