Daniel Marino

Another year has come and gone. They seem to be going by faster every year too. And with every year comes many changes, both professionally and personally. Since I’ve started blogging a few years back, I’ve taken the time at the end of every year to sum up what’s been going on in life, and set some goals for myself.

Career Changes

About nine months ago, I was extremely blessed to be offered a full-time job working for Cramer Dev. I had been doing freelance work for them for two years prior, so it was a comfortable change, having known most of my coworkers. This was welcomed for several reasons, but the number one is that I get to work from home and be with my family all the time.

I’ve just about stopped all freelance work and am not currently looking for any. The only projects outside of my full-time job that I’ve taken on are personal projects or favors for friends and family. I was blessed several years ago to have the freelance to help pay the bills and I’m blessed that I don’t need the extra money these days.

Changes on the Home Front

My wife and I are expecting our third child in early-March. This is another welcomed change and we’re all very excited. Children are a real blessing and we love our kids very much. It’s amazing to see just how much they’ve grown in the last year.

Goals for 2010

I like to set some goals, with the notion that if I don’t get something done, it’s no big deal. I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year Resolutions for a couple of reasons:

1. In Matthew 6:34, it reads, “So don’t ever worry about tomorrow. After all, tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
2. I don’t like to set things in stone, so that if I don’t get it done, I don’t have to feel like a failure.

For 2010, I’d like to make more time to spend with my family and do more out-of-the-house activities. I have a bad habit of blurring the lines between work life and home life. Working from home makes that even harder for me. These past nine months have been great and I’ve been working hard at learning where to set boundaries, and not let work overlap.

Professionally, I’d like to learn more about JavaScript, Object-oriented programming, and MVC frameworks. I’d also like to try to blog more often than I do now, but we’ll see about that one.

There are other goals that I have, but those are the big ones. It’s been a terrific year with big changes and I’m sure next year will be no different. Have a Happy New Year!

During my recent visit to Chicago for the Cramer Dev quarterly get-together, we attended the Windy City Rails conference. While I’m anything but a RoR developer, I still learned some interesting stuff about the language, as well as some general principles that can be applied to font-end development. Ryan Singer of 37Signals, gave a great talk entitled UI Fundamentals for Programmers. It was a very informative session, and in some ways, it has changed the way I approach the designing process.

Ryan believes that the UI is a really important layer of software because it’s what the users see. I happen to agree with him. In his presentation, he discussed some simple, yet key concepts for designing and implementing UI for applications. More specifically he talked about communicating with the user through on-screen language, as well as using visual techniques to consciously control what the user should be focusing on. He finished his presentation by talking about some techniques for implementing templates and helpers.

At the end of Ryan’s presentation, he took some questions from the audience. There were two questions in particular where I thought he made some rather bold statements about A/B testing and wireframing software. While every designer holds different opinions regarding these topics, I’d like to voice my dissent with Ryan’s views.

A/B Testing

When Ryan was asked for his thoughts on A/B testing, his reply was “We don’t have a lot of patience for that (testing).” I don’t have a lot of patience for A/B testing myself because it’s time consuming and it’s a total drag to create several variations of one function, or an entire web page for that matter. However, making the perfect UI, which would look and function differently for everyone, is an impossible task. I’m not saying that everything needs to be A/B tested on a web app, but to have the attitude, “make one version that makes sense to us and launch it,” means you’re ignoring the user experience for a potentially large number of your users.

Ryan also stated that “testing happens on the marketing side but not within the app.” More power to them. I’m sure 37Signals has crunched the numbers and knows whether it’s worth their time in dollars and cents to do A/B testing within their software. But from a general standpoint, a company could potentially be loosing out on a lot of profit all because they think A/B testing “is a drag.” What I’m saying is, don’t write off A/B testing because you don’t like to do it. Research and figure out if it’s worth your time and resources. In the end, it’s all about the ROI.

Another point I’d like to make about A/B testing is what makes sense to one user will not make sense to another. Design is very subjective and while a design may be aesthetically pleasing based on principle, not everyone is going to like it. Even though we’re inevitably going to alienate some of our users, the goal is to alienate the least amount as possible. If done properly, A/B testing can provide solid data about how your users respond to certain elements of a web site, including design aesthetics. One thing we might learn is that our users’ perception may be vastly different from our own. A very good book that talks about these principals in more detail is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Wireframing Software

Another question that came from the audience was asking Ryan about his thoughts on tools like Balsamiq, or wireframing tools in general. Ryan’s response was “I don’t understand what they are for.” I loathe wireframing software and would much rather work out ideas on a whiteboard or on paper. Ryan does not interact with external clients when designing for 37Signals, but I do. The reason why wireframing software is necessary is because a client expects more than just some doodles on a piece of paper.

Whereas Ryan might dive right into Photoshop or writing HTML, it doesn’t seem cost-effective to me to follow that process. My typical client tells me they want a website and that’s about all the info I get. If I didn’t ask any probing questions about features or content, I don’t think I’d get too much more information from the client until it was too late into the design process. Wireframing helps to breakthrough some of the informational and layout challenges. It would take a lot more time and resources to achieve the same goals once you’re in mock up or development phase of a project.

Everyone has different opinions regarding A/B testing and wireframing software. I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who would argue my points, and I’m not saying that my methods are the right way. There are multiple paths to achieving a finished website, and it will vary depending on the size of an organization, resources, and personal preferences.

I really like atebits new application, Tweetie, though I do have one feature request: the ability to hide the dock icon. It seems I’m not the only one who has requested this feature, according to this article. Before ever seeing that article, I emailed atebits asking for the feature enhancement. I received the following [canned] reply:

The dock icon is for now an inextricable part of the application, Tweetie is a much more powerful and robust twitter application than you may be used to. For all of Tweetie’s features to work properly it must have a dock icon.

Like Mail, or iChat or iTunes; Tweetie interacts with a database in the cloud, and with your computer. Tweetie has been designed to be a full citizen of the OS X world, and part of the obligations for that citizenship is to have a dock icon.

Before I get chewed out on my response, I have no idea what goes into developing a Mac application, and if it really does need a Dock icon in order for it to function properly, then I’ll drop my case. However, having used other fully-fledged applications that do not have Dock icons, I doubt it that it really does need the it for it to run properly.

Having said that, I think the response I received is total crap! An application should be built to benefit the users, not for the developer’s gratification. Do I think that this missing “feature” is going to greatly decline the number of users that will use Tweetie? No, I don’t. But if the users want the option to remove the Dock icon (like other applications such as Twitterific and LittleSnapper), put your pride aside and give them that option!

Today has marked a new chapter in my career. As many of you know, I have been working as a UI Developer for Dyn Inc. for the past six months. I have sincerely enjoyed my position as well as the work environment at Dyn Inc. I certainly was not seeking new employment, but an opportunity presented itself to me that I just couldn’t pass up.

I have been doing freelance work for Cramer Development on their Markup Factory web publishing platform for the past year. The owner, Josh, contacted me to see if I was interested in coming on full time as a Front-end Developer. It was not a decision I made lightly; after a lot of thought and prayer, I accepted his offer. I felt as though this was the direction God was leading me.

Cramer Dev. is based in Iowa, so the biggest change and benefit this new job brings to my family is that I’m now working from home. I’ve always wanted to be able to spend more time with my family, so this is a welcomed change—not to mention it cuts out eight hours of commuting each week.

Another benefit is that I got to buy all new hardware and software! I recently purchased a 15-inch MacBook Pro. I’m waiting for my Dell 2208WFP 22-inch Widescreen monitor to come in (hopefully by the end of the month). For software, I purchased Adobe CS4 Design Premium, Coda, Versions, and a few other little applications.

My new position with Cramer Dev. is a great blessing and opportunity for my family, which has always been my number one priority. I’m very excited to be in my new role and to be working with a very talented group of individuals. There are a lot of interesting projects in the pipeline that will be a lot of fun to work on!

I’m extremely guilty of letting my site become stagnant. I have good intentions of updating, but for one reason or another, I don’t. I’ve narrowed down why I don’t update my site to the following:

1. I’m lazy and don’t like to take the time to write a journal entry. I’ve mentioned this before, but writing doesn’t come natural to me. It usually takes me hours just to come up with a simple post.
2. I’m very hard on my work, and am super picky when it comes to choosing pieces for my portfolio. Unless I am at least 95% happy with my work, it doesn’t go in my portfolio.
3. I just don’t have the time I used to. I honestly don’t know how others do it. I’ve got a family and a full time job. After working 8 to 10 hours and playing with the kids, I just don’t feel like working on my site. That or I have other things around the house that need to be tended to.
4. I’m going through the same syndrome as Dave Shea and Andy Budd as I’m sure many others are: Twitter is killing the necessity or urge to write longer blog posts.

Ironically, my stats show the number of visitors my site receives is slowly increasing, despite hardly updating it. So this gives me two options:

1. Don’t fix what’s not broken — I can leave my site alone and let nature continue to take its course.
2. Can take a different approach that would make my site easy and quick to update, and still provide content that others would find useful or interesting.

I’m not sure which route I’m going to go. I have ideas, but again with the issue of lack of time and urge, I don’t know if I’d want to go through with implementing them.