81–90 of 94 posts
But having a good discipline in both you've mentioned, you find it lot easy to do your business later on, because you know what to do and where you should go.
Apologies for the delay in responding -- I'll go through and add comments as appropriate.
Thanks everyone for the advice, suggestions, and anecdotes!
Hybrid dev/designer here. My experience: Being a hybrid is difficult because of these kinds of situations. Even if you get to be very good at one or the other (or both), you're still perceived as inferior by virtue of your supposed "lack of focus." Bullshit. I had a hard time with this until I realized that I bring something rare to the table. The ability to traverse these two worlds is an immensely valuable trait. P…
To be honest I've never given much though to marketing myself. Maybe I'll pick up a Seth Godin book or two this summer.
I don't think it's possible to become excellent at both being a designer and a developer but I do think it's possible to become an excellent designer/developer and the distinction is important. First of all, I think there's been a devaluation in the term "excellent"; every startup is hiring "the best people" and all teams are "A+". Under the current, debased meaning of the word, it's trivial to be excellent at both.…
I like how you identify the designer/developer as a role in and of itself; embracing the tension instead of picking a side. I've never heard it phrased quite like that before, but I think it makes a lot of sense.
If he was talking about '[visual/user-interface] design' and '[algorithmically/architecturally-scalable] development', I could see there being a tangible tradeoff in acquiring expertise. Effort spent on one may offer little spillover benefit for the other, meaning larger returns to specialization. But '[visual/UI] design' and 'front-end development'? I'm perplexed that so much of a culture of splitting these roles ha…
One thing to note - there's value in people who can be "bridges." It might make some specialists angry, but there's value in people who can take a meaning in one realm of people and translate it to something meaningful in another. Designers and engineers tend to speak different languages, so being a person who can communicate the differences and take what a code wrangler means and turn it into a design (and vice vers…
Right now, the field has decided that the coder-designers are worth their weight in gold. As such, at this moment and for the foreseeable future, you are in a great position to pretty much write your own ticket wherever you want to go in the startup world. This will occur even if you don't ever progress your craft beyond being 'very good' at both design and front-end development. For this reason, you now have a good…
Can you really split it? I mean, when you think about HTML 5 you have something in between. It has so many ways to connect data/functionality with design. With HTML 4 it was like backend, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. All separated. But now you have HTML 5, you have data in code (data-attributes), lots of semantic web features, tons of JS APIs, Canvas (2D, 3D), asynchronous connections, do stuff like templates and while you…
Check out page 46 of the Valve handbook, I think their take offers some insight: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p... On the other hand, there's an argument to be made to the tune of: "Try to sit in two chairs and you'll fall between them." My opinion is that anyone who builds and/or leads a successful startup will tend to wear many hats during the process, especially in the beginning, so i…
There are certainly many, many skills that go into building and running a tech startup, but I think the technical skill continuum looks (broadly) like this:
systems > back end > front end > design
The best teams I've been on have included members from each discipline with overlap into their neighboring areas. When transitioning from phase to phase (or, in the sort of rapid development that we're seeing more often today, where several tasks are occurring in parallel) it's super important to not have any gaps between segments.
You are focus in the wrong question. His advice is like saying: you are good at tables and divs, pick one and be great. Design and front end goes hand in hand, is really hard to be excellent on one and sucky at the other. His advice refelects two things and neither are related to you: 1. His view of the world is framed by specialization. You're a good pawn if i can easily put you in a box that I can understand, but i…
But your overall point is well taken. I'll focus on doing good work and try not to worry about where I 'fit'.