Tag: Career

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Development Testing Upgrade Web Technologies

Fascinating or some what frustrating?

So many courses from different providers.

Which ones are politically correct?

Spending time, involves patience.

As we grow, time feels short.

It’s not always a simple as it looks.

Sure you can follow…

But there are obstacles along the way.

The kind that are not transparent in guidance.

Lessons learned, it will never be.

Acknowledging this…

The cycles of improvement are never-ending.

So the main thing to take from this…

You’re in control, you can’t please all, but you can align the balance with the majority.

Simplify processes not just for yourself, but for everyones case.

With simplicity comes flexible, growth, speed and expansion.

Navigate the play field.

Be your best in the given circumstances.

Die trying, you may get lucky.

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Branding Development Marketing

Find Yourself

Spare a moment?

Teach if you can.

Invest in some time.

Learn as much as you can.

Perhaps…

Share a thought together.

Maybe if you’re lucky…

Trade a skill for another?

Who knows what you’ll might find.

From entry level to fullstack…

There’s always something to learn.

Call it what you want.

The cycle of learning forms teaching.

Imagine and reiterate.

The above with the below.

Apply methods with different contexts.

Lifehacker.

Categories
Development Reviews

I have a theory, but correct me if I’m wrong…

Working in the Web realm is fascinating, but does have it’s tolerance.

Balancing many factors that one may not be aware of.

Add that with business needs and growing demands from order of hierarchy.

The cycle of success continues with continuous learning, finding, trialing new tech stacks to building and improving software architecture.

Driven by passion and ambition to self learn, is all that was needed.

Without a software degree it’s pretty hard to summarise.

That you may know more then you think you know, but then again you only know more when you are able to investigate and trial these new ideas.

Must thank those who understand and give the time to let one manage their own.

Lessons learnt and upheld adopting the new, due to valid reasons keeping tech stack consistent for upgrading and maintaining purposes with limited resources.

It’s time to let go of the small and think bigger. Push those boundaries. Invest in the new to increment features and aim to replace the old.

First to explore, first to trial, but wait a second, we have a team with individual mindsets and abilities to do the same or similar.

Teach, train and mentor maybe a new territory for one, but not often looked upon due to time management in many businesses.

So there’s concerns in the blind spots. Noted and mentioned to many, but how and who will address it?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s up to the individuals in the team to embrace the journey together.

Setting aside some time and pushing back on the frequent demands.

Better yet, let the order of hierarchy set some time to continuous review information before passing down the chain of commands.

With continuous review of information, refinement of order become transparent, data become valid and less likely to consume time rectified.

While from the bottom continuing with the business needs in a regular pattern that aligns the learning goals, teaching one another, which is one of many challenging business objectives overlooked.

Certainly a challenge this year, but appreciate able to work in the current conditions.

Categories
Web Technologies

Every business needs it…

When scaling as a business, usually there’s a pattern of manual processes that requires time and effort in which usually becomes repetitive processes.

This is where businesses need to start building automated processes to cut out the need for manual tasks.

It allows the average person to work on something much more meaningful and with that in mind discovers new ideas and and a keen willingness to go beyond personal interests to discover more.

That’s the reality the average person needs to know.

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Reviews

Office Politics

Things just keep changing constantly, another job another mess… a repetitive process of seeing code that may once have been produced to good business needs.

But while business changes are happening, there’s a lack of poor coding standard among the fast pace environment.

Factors may include limited time, short fall on talent, to miss communication between colleagues or teams, or just the nature of employment to human error.

I see that trending… a.. lot, even in well documented or reading materials, just check my Instagram feed out, pretty basic examples, but yet one may not see it straight away…

And here I am learning programming, how dynamic languages from learning JQuery to vanilla JS using React.js and Vue.js all work behind the scene, noticing state cycles and how interactive elements on markup react, whether it’s a button or a URL link.

Seeing data races when elements on pageload load slow or when users react to events on a page.

Or, when functions are buried within function and script files bundled randomly that causes conflicts among execution.

But, I’ve fixed the mess with some history behind what it should and shouldn’t do and where to look for these files to edit.

Sure it took several days or some week or two to get it correct, but not bad to say I don’t have the correct qualifications, just a heck of a lot minor qualifications and plenty of experience in and out my career progression.

Understanding ones code and then attempting to fix it, would be suicidal – it’s not easy as building something new with the common known tools one may use.

One true thing that does amazes me, how each user tries to navigate their way through a website or software looking for what they need/want in information or running certain tasks.

The way how one uses it, whether it was designed to do so or was designed to do something alternative – always look outside the box.

And now I’ve come to my senses there’s a lot I could do, but my time is worth so much more, only look at the bigger picture by prioritize crucial tasks first given working in scrum and using sprints to weed out the least irrelevant requirements, and when those fall together, the least irrelevant follow as if it becomes a waterfall of working code.

I still have lots to learn and cover, yet striding the tech stack swiftly with self motivation and some help from the smartest people I’ve come across, but one advice I’d give to all… Nothing is correct and not everything is also wrong, it’s finding that right balance of what is true and false using your own instincts, most likely from experience.

Those starting fresh, start early and make as many errors as possible, as later you’ll realise your strengths and collaborate where ever possible in teams or departments.

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Reviews

Fighting for your attention

There’s a point throughout the working process where your attention to knowledge is needed elsewhere, but what do you do if you have scheduled work and clients fighting between themselves for your attention, but also here and there trying to bypass paying for such services?

Fair play, I don’t mind helping people here and there, but when expecting work to be completed at such short notice, especially which is an experimental approach (meaning something you’re willing to do that isn’t in your skill set) – what do you do?

Charge them a premium? Ask them to wait in line? Or, squeeze them in wherever possible? What if you’re unsure how long a work process would take given it’s not in your remit? Question, is this an accurate decision to take? Something that always keeps me awake at night!

Instincts tell me to be careful there may be a borderline, causing disaster without knowing and while others around you hang in there waiting for this moment to happen. A quick decision whether the attempt was worthy of you being in employment or a means to end employment if work wasn’t carried out accordingly to their expectations.

This is where backups are a highly important and should be available to recover if needed. A rule of thumb to anyone working in the digital realm, keep a backup!

Spending personal time to self-develop has shown many methods to approach different cases in work environment, but what if you have to develop others that constantly needing help? Leading the way for clients and their staff included.

I’ve been there myself too and realise the flaw in the working environment.

No one wants to teach others if they have to teach themselves to learn and develop while earning bread and butter to live (this doesn’t even include personal activities) – that’s like double work loading and shortening life balance. So what is the solution here you may ask?

There are genuine people asking me all sorts of questions, some even I don’t have the answer to, but I guess from my experience, if you really want to know something, start spending personal time to self-develop and stop relying on others.

Sounds harsh right? Welcome to reality.

Working in a software environment made me realise a lot of differences and advantages for potential improvements in business and self-development plans.

Ability to discover and make ground breaking improvement whether it’s just an idea/thought or tweaks in code. This is something that attracts me to keep working with determination no matter what is offered to the table.

This boils down to one personal question that always rises above others during interviews, what type of development plans are in place for personal development for employees (this is a big factor for my case that most businesses tend to rule out, simply because they expect you to know ‘apparently’ to become successfully hired).

There’s also the case one may already have these services in place and by experiences not all training platforms cover the true ‘know how’s’, which lead to thinking what other incentives do one offer… in-house training?

Doubt that, given the reasons above.

Categories
Activities Reviews

It’s 2017!

A new blog post due for this year and already one month gone by so quick!
(Brace yourself this might be the longest post ever).

I’ve put aside the thought of applying for vacancies three months after my previous post back in July, simply because it was enough time for any response and I decided to focus on what I said I’d do next.

Making progress in many avenues my health and wellbeing via Instagram, my ability to learn new technologies seen via LinkedIn and still continuing.

The general sense of interests in design and history, currency or money, but no value, curiosity most of all took place, knowing it might be small margins, trusting my gut instincts, filtering through people’s opinions and whether the media has anything to do with it.

Using my expertise and knowledge gathered through the web, my eBay store has gained some impressions and slowly gaining community support whether it’s genuine collectors or just support from different people around the web.

Up to this date, there’s only been one bad review and that was the first person that had purchased from a zero-rated seller, that’s pretty understandable and acceptable. But rounding up to three hundred, five-star positive reviews, it’s pretty untouchable and maintaining this tall order is not easy I can tell you this, a lot of effort has to be put in via communication and manual admin work; that’s what general people think is easy. It’s only easy if you’re just doing that!

I find it somewhat amusing that I can get interviews, but cannot gain a single decent salary from a vacancy. Was I too honest? Either way my heart was set in favour of those who had trusted me to deliver what I could.

It’s helped gained new insights to what is possible and gained me some (well a heck of a lot of) new skills where less knowledge was applicable and that comes to another point in my journey…

The last developer standing; always comes to a point when you’re the only developer in an agency to leave and I figured out exactly why.

There are many methods to build the same or similar approach whether using new or old technical languages.

The problem is not all new languages are available for old technology and when you’re dealing with less technical people, that is super hard to explain across in layman’s term.

Developers like myself either find a job elsewhere with more technical minded people around them or maybe higher salary often the case, but for me I knew I’d have to just quit ahead to find more time to pursue these problems.

It took me 6 months after a senior web developer left and I quickly realised my boundaries and I realised what these were and off I went on a heavy mission of self learning all different levels of development and that penny just dropped to how much work there really is in web development and why the demand of salary is oh so high with limited time frame expectations by bosses or clients.

Anyways, as a developer problem solving my self learning and living on savings made me realised something more important than ever over a vacancy and that is family and friends, they stay by you even when times are hard.

Been to two university friends and a close relative weddings and a christening after my previous blog post events; has put life concept into perspective. It’s not really about just a job or salary… it’s about having the finer balance of life. I can vouch for it by realising working early mornings and late evenings every week; soon or later that gets dull and depressing resulting burnout.

On another level having much more time, meetups in the technology community is rising and my mission is to attend as many as I can, meet people in communities who share similar interests and hopefully find some useful tips from there to progress forward.

Having a general understanding of many programming languages; how do these go into a CV that is somewhat out-dated far too often and it comes to a question is there really any need for a CV, especially when there are websites out there that you can use as professional CV profiles to do the job?

I’ll save this thought for a future post and until then, peace! ✌

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Activities Reviews

Right Now…

Right now I feel relieved from the stress caused through work, knowing I have helped wherever I could and also help personal and family matters too; car accident, Grandfather passing and sisters wedding; my gut instincts told me I made the right choice here.

Having much more time, I’ve got myself into a daily routine of positive thoughts and actions, starting at spending some time in technology meet ups through meetup.com – a place to meet people in communities who share similar interests.

This was something I heard a while back that was gaining some reputation for tech meet ups, be it small and large size companies talking about how to improve management, methods and processes at different scales of production; it’s interesting and at the same time relating to experience.

While upcoming events are planned out, I’ve started self studying further more in particular technologies in the hope it will overcome the struggles in development work and keeping an eye out for new relevant vacancies.

My concern with job vacancies are the majority of listings are far from being specialist, it’s a do it all fully fledged developer, which does put me off from applying and the fact most jobs are advertised through recruitment rather than the companies themselves. I do get why they list nearly every possible technical skill, but don’t get me started with the advertised salaries, there’s just such a big difference when discussing this in interviews.

Still I do apply to ones that I can relate to or could develop in, but it’s just a shame there’s a big gap between skilled and highly skilled developers and that this scope widens as every company is looking out for the best.

This is why I spend my time mostly in experimenting with the web, what can I achieve on my own and what is really possible with the web.

At the same time since being in employment, my health has had its toll sitting down at a desk nearly all day, so gym has been a priority every other day, trying to constantly beat my previous goal.

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Reviews

I left the process.

Finally finding out you’re the only one with a technical mind, a logical system thinker.

Trying to make ends meet and continuing to learn as much as I could with the limited time I had in and out of office hours.

I didn’t see any clear opportunities left after knowing the learning qualifications were in another’s name.

The situation was just getting worse hiring external Back End Developers and my role slightly moving towards Project Management – not something that really interested me, but I had no choice.

I was at a breaking point; realising managing external developers is a nightmare. Set deadlines and external developers not responding in time for client expectations.

It was that time; I knew I couldn’t do anything more and thinking about the other colleagues in the moment of time and my personal activities – like my sister’s wedding preparations coming up…

I decided enough is enough; a much advance developer is needed for this role and with this in mind I handed my notice and continued to work till the end of the process.

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Reviews

I’m in a sticky situation…

I’ve somehow managed to survive over one year of mayhem, demonstrating a higher accuracy rate and cleaner code with multiple solutions – now on my own out of comfort zones to challenge the unknown path to success.

After continuing for three months, I’ve realised just how much work is involved in web development; my strengths, my weaknesses and the lack of knowledge in certain grey areas – has lowered my confidence.

The state of my current issue; same salary, double the workload, but given the opportunity to get trained using any preferred method of learning resources, all paid by the agency – as long as I don’t break the bank balance!

My initial thoughts were… is this fair? Spending more time learning, doubling up the workload of another employee who’d left the process and still spending only the same amount of hours (9am-5.30pm) as one employee? Is it fair to compare in house Developers to Freelance Developers who have more time behind the scenes to get the work done on time? I’m feeling a little short changed here if you had asked me!

I eventually found out at my career progression that build had multiple meanings; given my CV had amends with reference to design and build, which I did and still do actually agree to in my interview process.

How I perceived the term build was using WordPress from the admin panel; using pages and post to build a website like many WordPress users would – not actually how the agency thought it, from the admin editor or backend of WordPress files using FTP. I guess this was the professional edge for hiring agencies to build custom websites.

Sure I do get it now after using CSS files to style many current client websites up, but where does Front End and Back End stand?

I’ve gradually picked some parts of the ropes up, but every time I get stuck at some stage of the back end building process, there wasn’t anyone to turn to and that this was a reminder that I did say I could build in the eyes of the agency.

At the time I joined in December 2014 with the agency, all sites were blocked from updating to newer versions of content management system and plugins. I found this very strange as I had come from another company who would update their client sites on a regular basis – yes a Back End Developer or a much higher rank Developer; be it Lead or Senior – they would of done this for me at the time.

I’ve done work in the past from a Front End perspective, but now I am doing both; Back End as well. I’d spend lots of time after work trying to improve the current state of client-managed websites as they were getting hacked on a daily basis when the Lead Developer was with us.

I am slightly concerned that in this day and age there are still agencies out there that do this, but moreover shocked at the Lead Developer for not taking this responsibility seriously and had left the process as I gradually unveiled the truth why website were getting hacked; it was mainly down to the current state of the websites with legacy versions of CMS and plugins.

Digital war is on the rise and hacking is occurring more often than not and I took the opportunity to slow the hacking process down, as there is really no full bulletproof plan to protect websites. There are numerous of methods that can lead to hackers hacking away at any sites, but there are also many ways to delay the process by restricting and strengthening websites.

Anyway cut to the chase, my beef is now to find solutions to problems I really don’t know how to solve. It’s a classic nightmare for me, but also a challenge to prove I can do this time and time again – pretty hard especially on your own.