Designer/Developer Workflow Conference - June 19-20, 2010

Conference Review

Whether you're a developer, a designer, or fancy yourself to be a citizen of both worlds, it is nearly impossible for anybody at any place in that spectrum to completely avoid the need to have at least some knowledge of both disciplines. Designers need to have a good understanding of what is possible in the development world so that they know what is and is not realistic design, best ways to represent transitions, animations, and ajax activities in their designs, and how to make their designs re-usable as tangible assets in the final product. Developers need to know how to interpret design specs and prototypes, how to use the tools that make workflow from design to development smoother, and in the case where the developer is essentially the designer as well, how to create prototypes and wireframes that result in re-usable assets. Even if the employer is of such size that the design and development departments are completely segregated, there is still always the need for the two to be able to communicate well and avoid "cultural" conflicts. Any way you slice it, designers and developers are two sides to the same coin, and enhancing each and the workflow between them is a very real need.

The Designer Developer Workflow Conference, the brain child of Designer/Developer/Instructor extraordinnaire Dee Sadler and hosted this month in Kansas City, Missouri,  expertly targeted this exact need. As an attendee and humble speaker at the conference, I can honestly say that out of all the conferences I have attended in the past few years, THIS one provided me a large relative percentage of information I found to be new to me and left me feeling like I had gotten a huge return on my investment. The session topics were hand picked from a large number of submissions and seperated into three genres: designer, developer, and hybrid. In all honesty, I had not previously heard of many of the speakers and so was a little skeptical as to how impressive and relevant the presentation contents would be to me. But after only a couple of sessions it became VERY clear to me that I had walked into a goldmine of information that I had not previously been exposed to. Every single session I attended, without fail, kept me absolutely riveted and had me walking out at the end with a mind full of fresh perspectives and concepts I wanted to explore further.

The venue was absolutely perfect as well, being an ideal balance of upscale and moderation, and not three blocks from Kansas City's "Power and Light District", a several square block area of restaurants, martini bars, pubs, and outdoor entertainment. And might I add that the people of Kansas City...well, they're just doggone nice to look at!

Dee Sadler outdid herself on this project. Despite the immense level of stress and work that must have been upon her shoulders, she was like a calm mother hen guiding her flock of bright and excited speakers and guests through what turned out to be, in this reviewer's eyes, a hugely successful first annual Designer Developer Workflow conference! I am very much looking forward to next year's! Congratulations, Dee Sadler. You rock, girlfriend.

The Art and Science of RIA's

by Ben Stucki

As I've mentioned before (but it's worth mentioning again), this year's first annual Designer Developer Workflow conference was, in my opinion, a monumental success and an outstanding start to what I'm sure will become an annual tradition. The session topics hovered anywhere between developer-oriented and designer-oriented topics, yet NONE of the sessions ever left off addressing the needs of the other side of the equation; every designer-centric topic contained material relevant to and comprehendable by developers, and vica versa. It was almost like having achieved world peace. :)

So, one of the sessions I attended was presented by an individual I consider to be quite wise in the art of development. His name is Ben Stucki (pronounced "stew key"), and if the man ever runs for president, he's got my vote. Ben delivered a presentation entitled "The Art and Science of RIAs", though in this reviewer's opinion, a more appropriate title would have been "The Art and Science of Good Code", as this presentation delved deeply into Ben's personal philosophies and rules on "Good Code" and, though the plethora of information he shared is indeed relevant to RIAs, was definitely just as applicable across all application genres.

In this session, rather than simply focus on what "Good Code" means, Ben made it a point to do the one thing that is absolutely essential to a coder before he can ever correct the error of his ways: dig all the way down to the root causes of "bad code". Some of those causes arise from the developer's own lackings while others stem from areas outside the developer's control, such as a project manager. These negative outside influences can produce circumstances that affect how the developer chooses to code. For instance, setting arbitrary, unrealistic deadlines, allowing the project scope to change mid-stream, and not listening to developer feedback can all produce effects that cause the developer to produce what Ben referred to as "Technical Debt". Technical Debt is when the pressure of a looming unrealistic deadline basically forces the developer to choose between "pleasing the boss" and "doing it right". It's that manner of coding that gives one the advantage of meeting the deadline now, but will most certainly have to be paid back later. By continuing on in a way that produces Technical Debt, eventually the application gets to the point where it would be easier and more cost effective to scrap it and start from scratch rather than attempt to add any more features or modifications.

The 50 minute presentation was chocked FULL of wonderful tips, guidelines, philosophies, viewpoints, and rules that Ben personally has adopted. Ben's ability to articulate his ideas in both word and illustration are impeccable, and his passion for his art and craft are not only quite obvious, but are also sure to provoke the listener's own zeal and passion to improve in their art as well. If you ever have opportunity to hear Ben speak, be sure and not miss it!

You can follow Ben on Twitter at @benstucki, and visit his blog at blog.benstucki.net

Using Twitter and Facebook to Market Your Creative Services

by Lisa Heselton

Being the enlightened individual I am, I decided to expand my horizons and attend a session that wasn't directly relevant to programming or prototyping (the equivalent of a guy forcing himself to watch a chick flick end to end for the sole purpose of ensuring that he still has feelings). In this instance, the session I had the distinct privilege of sitting in on was called "Using Twitter and Facebook to Market Your Creative Services", presented by Lisa Heselton (aka @kavka on twitter!)

First off, let me just say that Lisa (if you're reading this), nobody enunciates as well as you do! :) Your consonants are crisper than crisp, your vowels are formed to perfection, and your delivery...that of a true seasoned professional! :)

The overall purpose of this presentation, as I interpreted it, was to gather the collective wisdom and experience of all attendees and share it communally, with Lisa expertly guiding the discussions and contributing a large helping of her own knowledge. She set the stage with a brief introduction to what social media is and a high level view of how it is relative to creative professionals. She then graciously invested a good portion of session time to allowing each and every attendee a few minutes of floor time, introducing themselves, sharing how they currently use social media, and what it is they came to the session hoping to learn. With everyone's position clearly revealed, people began an orderly interactive discussion of their experiences and observations with and of social media, asking their questions of the group as a whole. Under Lisa's guiding hand, everyone walked away having their questions answered and armed with a large collection of fresh ideas and resources.

Personally, being only a casual user of social media and not having any creative services to market, I came away with a major epiphany; an analogy of extreme accuracy that I'd like to thank Lisa for helping to impart to me. The analogy is this: Successfully using social media is EXACTLY like successfully participating in a cocktail party composed of some familiar individuals and many new ones. Just as you would never go this party planning on doing nothing more than speaking your opinion with no intention or interest in listening to responses, you should NEVER allow yourself to utilize social media as a billboard. After all, you're not dropping flyers on the windshields of cars here; you are talking to real people whose need to be engaged in a two way dialog demands your greatest reverence. Just as you would never go to a party with the sole intention of trying to sell the other party goers some product, so should you never take social media for granted and treat it as a captured audience of potential customers. On the contrary, what you SHOULD do is to introduce yourself to the group and to individuals; let people know something about you, personally, regardless of whether or not you would like to generate some business. Everybody can smell a disinterested car salesman from a mile away. Likewise, it takes no special skills to be able to mentally compile a person's collection of tweets and read between those lines to know the true level of their sincerity. Now, it IS okay to talk about your services at a party, but everyone would agree that there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

I could go on and on with this analogy, and so can you. But I am now convinced that anybody is able to clear up 99% of the mystery of how to properly and successfully utilize social media if they look at it in PRECISELY the same way as they would utilize a casual cocktail party. It's not at ALL a huge mystery! Social media is simply a new way to hold a global, ongoing cocktail party, and if you are part of any social media outlet...then dude/dudette...you're just a person at a party. Have fun with it, but remember proper party etiquette.

Thanks Lisa Heselton! You really rocked this one. ;)

Prototyping: A Component for Success by Chris Griffith

I can't speak highly enough of the Designer Developer Workflow conference, aka "D2W"! Having been using Coldfusion for a long time now, I find more often than not that I glean maybe 10% new knowledge and information from the other conferences I attend. This one, however, has skillfully addressed a niche that I haven't previously been educated on in such a focused, concise manner: The "divide" between development and design.

Let me start this review by saying that Chris Griffith is an outstanding speaker, engaging his audience and enlightening them with well organized material.

In this particular session, Chris addressed, at a high level, the values of and approaches to prototyping, or building out representations of an application before it is actually created. Because Chris works for a company that has a global presence, with both time and language barriers present, prototyping is a vital part of his company's workflow. Whether it's just a quick mockup using Fireworks (a "Fidelity A" level prototype), a basic simulation built in html and with hard coded values (a "Fidelity B" level prototype), or a larger scale, "ready for user testing" type prototype fleshed out with data and working script ("Fidelity C" level), it is Chris' experience that some kind of mockup is essential in order to solidify the vision between stakeholders, designers, and developers. In fact, Chris says that more often than not the prototype should be used during user testing, before resources have been dedicated to building the actual application.

One guideline that Chris offered is to always think of your prototypes as completely expendable and to not invest so much effort and time in them that you couldn't just throw them away and start from scratch. He also,in the interest of project timelines, personally doesn't focus so much on creating re-usable assets in his prototypes, but builds out only what is needed in as short a time as possible. As Chris says, building a prototype should never be allowed to become a monumental task.

Chris uses a variety of Adobe and non-Adobe tools in his prototyping efforts. Whether it's Fireworks, Flash Builder, Coldfusion, HTML, Javascript, or any combination thereof, his philosophy of "use whatever tool makes the most sense for the project at hand" is a wise one indeed.

To sum it all up, Chris admonishes us all to be aware that "the only cost in software development is CHANGE". And, because a picture IS worth a thousand words, smart prototyping is an absolutely essential part of any efficient workflow.

Thanks Chris! I look forward to hearing you speak again soon!

SPEAKER HIGHLIGHTS: DOUG BOUDE

Who should come to your session and why?

OOP in the CF world is here, it's here to stay, and in my strong personal opinion, any CF programmer who doesn't embrace it, and soon, will find themselves left behind career-wise. For any Coldfusion developer who came from a procedural background, however, Object Oriented Programming...conceptually and practically...can be a daunting career paradigm shift to undertake. Having myself come from a procedural mindset, I know exactly just how frustrating it can be to find, consume, digest, and assimilate these new ideas into one's existing knowledge base. In this session, I will share a concise yet thorough synopsis of some of the more common OO terms and concepts as I have come to understand and use them, in the hope of helping to connect the dots between your existing understandings and those of OOP.

Who is this session for, then? If you have the need for an OO primer, are fully engaged in making the switch to OOP, or have been doing OOP since before it even had a name, this session is for you. For the newbie, it offers a good general dissection of OOP, along with a decent translation of the ideas and terms you will encounter; for the active learner, it holds a Texas size portion of information that can be merged and compared with what you have already gleaned on your own; and for the seasoned vet, it offers the opportunity to get a solid feel for how your less OO-experienced peers "think" about OOP in a CF context, empowering you to be able to more effectively impart the knowledge you possess to "the rest of us".

 
Are there any projects you are working on of interest right now?

As THE IT department at my company, my project list is fairly long, dynamic, and diverse. Much of it consists of duct taping a legacy PHP system to help temporarily streamline the company's corporate workflow. However, I am working on two interesting, "from the ground up" projects that I'd like to share a little bit about.
 
Project one is a Model-Glue application that allows its users to efficiently upload insurance claims in the form of a spreadsheet directly to an industry-prominent third party vendor via their API. This app leverages a database schema that allows individual users to create mappings between their particular spreadsheet layouts and the vendor's XML schema via an intuitive GUI, then transforms the spreadsheet data into the target XML files utilizing XML Stylesheets and XML Schema documents (XSD). All in all, this has been a VERY interesting project that is teaching me a LOT about XSLT, XSDs, and XML transformations in general, not to mention honing my OOP architectural skills.

Additionally, I am in the process of using Fireworks to prototype an entire new system (project two) to replace the legacy PHP system. This new system will be built using the Coldbox 3.0 toolset/framework.

What does workflow mean to you?

Workflow to me is the rhyme, meter, and tempo of doing what I do from day to day, along with the individual applications that I use in the process. I am the artisan, and the processes, methodologies, and tools I utilize to transform raw ideas into functional works of art IS workflow. 

What size company do you work for, and do they practice workflow now? and how?

I work for a small family owned Insurance Adjuster firm based in Boerne, Texas, and have been with them for a little over one year now. All told, there are probably 10 employees including myself. Workflow in the IT Department (which consists only of me), has been non-existent prior to my coming on board. The workflow I have put in place for myself is very dynamic in order to adapt to the company's dynamic business needs, but core to it are the religious use of an off-site code repository (Assembla, a third party SVN provider), Eclipse as my IDE, WAMP as my local development server environment, the usage of CanvasWiki to centralize all of the critical "if Doug got hit by a bus" type information, and Amazon S3/Jungle Disk to back up critical server data off site. Beyond that, I use a lot of Notepad, Editpad Pro, Firebug, some Jing, and Fireworks. 

What message would you have to someone starting in the business right now, or wanting to become a hybrid? A designer or a developer, be specific.

I can't particularly speak to the subject of wanting to become a designer (since I can't relate at ALL to such an idea! Craigslist looks cool to me.), but to the aspiring developer I would have a few words....

Programming is nothing more than solving problems, and I do believe that most people are decent problem solvers. The only difference with application development is in the kinds of tools that you will use; otherwise, you are simply solving problems.

Believe that nothing...no idea, no concept, no fancy term... is too difficult for you to grasp. After all, look at all the other people who do it successfully! And the majority of them are not smarter than you, I guarantee it. Bang your head against a thing long enough, and it WILL go in! I've proven this time and time again to myself.

Lastly, always take pride in the code you will write, and be ever striving to improve your knowledge and technique. It is your craft, your creation, the expression of your creativity, and how well it functions AND is written is (like it or not) a reflection of your skill and ability; of you as a developer.

In just a little over 2 weeks I'll be in Kansas City, Missouri speaking at the first annual D2W (Designer/Developer Workflow) conference, organized with the specific purpose of helping to enhance and/or bridge the gap in the knowledge and workflow disparities that can exist between the design and development aspects of a project. Though we in the CF/Adobe community are fortunate enough to have several conferences to choose from each year, I can't help but feel that Dee Sadler has very successfully addressed a gap in the genres and educational targets as covered by current conferences, thus further complementing the cornucopia of information available to not only developers, but also (in the case of this conference), designers.

Taking a look at the session schedule reveals what I beieve to be a unique and intriguing array of topics not covered with such focus anywhere else. For many of us developers, there is a very real need to at least be somewhat proficient as a designer in order to perform our jobs. Prototyping applications, organizing the way we transform client requests into functional products, enhancing the way we communicate with designers and stakeholders, being able to utilize the Adobe tools our employers provide us to their full capacity...all areas we can stand to improve in, and all topics covered by this conference. 

 Considering the relatively small conference fee, and the fact that there are still two weeks until the conference starts (meaning airline tickets can still be obtained at discount), I would definitely recommend that you at least check out some of the particulars of what D2W is offering.