The Journey
I decided to liken the journey of a developer or tester (I am a tester) to that of an outdoor activity that I relate to. I love hiking and taking part in remote outdoor adventures, including backpacking and canyoneering. Some very beautiful sights can be had, and they usually come at several costs. Besides the physical toil required, there is – in many cases – a preparation phase of readying tools, devices, and all manner of provisions to make the journey safer, more comfortable, and in some cases, doable at all. There is the mental preparation of understanding the terrain and physical barriers you will be up against, as well as a grasp of what conditions to prepare for weather wise. Bottom line is, you pay the price up front; you examine charts and maps, you have a plan, and you take with you what you will need. These all lead to a safe and enjoyable journey and minimize the scenarios you are not prepared for. I would liken our finished product in software to the beauty that nature has to offer.

Just as proper foresight and careful planning in hiking can lead to a rewarding outing in nature, similar preparation in development can lead to more robust, quality, and beautiful software products.

“If I had 6 hours to cut down a tree…I would spend 4 hours sharpening the axe.”
- Abraham Lincoln

Creating Value
What are you doing to create value for yourself and your employer, now and in the future? How do you stay current? How hungry are you?

Here are some tips for keeping yourself sharp and valuable:

• Make yourself accessible to your coworkers
• Get yourself in the loop
• Communicate and be responsive
• Make your product look good
• Make your producer (project manager) look good
• Ask those around you what you can do to be more helpful

Followed by tips for staying current:

• Follow blogs (RSS, etc.)
• Participate with user groups
• Twitter
• Books
• Explore new technology

Robert C. Martin, in The Clean Coder, suggests developers spend 60 hours per week at their profession. The first 40 for their employer, and the remaining 20 for themselves by means of practice, working with new technology, learning a new language, etc. I would offer that those who sufficiently prepare will reap the most satisfying rewards.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Interact with clients, exploring and advising technological possibilities, discovering solutions that fit their goals
• Architect and develop large-scale, well-written applications
• Write clean, structured, object-oriented code with change and reuse in mind

EXPERIENCE/QUALIFICATIONS

• Object-oriented PHP experience
• Demonstrated experience working with large applications
• Moderate experience with Javascript (e.g. jQuery), HTML, CSS
• Security minded

BONUS ROUND

• Experience with MVC frameworks (CakePHP)
• Image manipulation or rasterization
• Experience with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, or other cloud environments

BENEFITS / PERKS

• Competitive salary
• 401k matching
• Health, dental, vision
• Gym membership
• Flexible schedule
• 15 days PTO / year
• Additional week of PTO end of December if sales goals are met

Contact Us

At Rain, this might be different than at other places. I know there are many product companies, for example, who separate their graphic designers and UX designers in completely different divisions of the company (marketing and product development, respectively). But in an agency that sort of separation doesn’t work very well. It also becomes haphazard having one designer (graphic or UX) making all the decisions relating to the presentation of functionality on a client’s product. Depending on the size of the application or digital experience, it can be a pretty large undertaking to have one person do it all. And often-times, when it’s all done by the same dude, it’s often either beautiful looking with UI problems, or very thought-through UI-wise, but nothing special to look at.

At Rain, it works well to have our UX folks build requirements, conduct the research and analysis, write the stories, build the information architecture, build wireframes and prototypes, and otherwise make life easy on a graphic designers and developers who can focus, collaboratively, on adding a layer of beauty, creativity, and functionality on that infrastructure we’ve laid for them.

In an effort to answer that original question though (what does a UX professional do, and how does that relate to what a graphic designer does?) I started naming all the skills a good UX professional has to have at least some competency in to be effective in an agency setting. Since a UX professional has to be a “Jack of all trades” it ended up being a large list. Below you will find the info-graphic (click to enlarge) of what I deem to be the balance of skills the ideal UX candidate at Rain would have. This won’t be the same everywhere. I think the list of skills might, but the level of competency in each area is going to be different depending on the company and its priorities. Click here to download the PDF version.

Sound exciting? Good! Now let me mention some downsides.

On the server-side: security policies must allow for long-lived requests, additional ports must be opened, and traffic must be managed to allow for all of the different Socket.IO communication protocols (NetOps may need to be bribed).

On the client-side: corporate firewalls may block Socket.IO ports. Or, anti-virus software may block Socket.IO communication.
https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/wiki/Socket.IO-and-firewall-software

The biggest downside to Socket.IO is being forced to use Socket.IO. A client cannot talk to a Socket.IO server speaking WebSockets, or long polling; rather, a client must speak Socket.IO over WebSockets, or long polling. Socket.IO has accidentally become a protocol, and it is an unstable protocol. In fact, there are several Socket.IO implementations in programming languages other than Socket.IO’s native NodeJS which have qualifiers such as “currently not compatible with 0.7+”. This instability may be fine for a single application, but thinking of integrating with multiple Socket.IO servers might be the subject of nightmares.

Ideally, all browsers, firewalls, and anti-viruses would support WebSockets. In the meantime, Socket.IO provides a solution that should be adopted after careful consideration.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Interact with clients, exploring and advising technological possibilities, discovering solutions that fit their goals
Architect and develop large-scale, well-written applications
Write clean, structured, object-oriented code with change and reuse in mind

EXPERIENCE/QUALIFICATIONS

Proven experience in writing native Android applications using java
Knowledge of using the related development tools (e.g. Eclipse, et al)
Advanced knowledge of the Android sdk

BONUS ROUND

Application deployed in an Android Market
Demonstrated experience with other mobile platforms such as iOS, WP7, etc
Experience with multi-platform solutions such as AIR for Mobile or PhoneGap
Game programming experience
C2DM experience

BENEFITS / PERKS

Competitive salary
401k matching
Health, dental, vision
Gym membership
Flexible schedule
15 days PTO / year
Additional week of PTO end of December if sales goals are met

Contact Us

1 can (14 oz) artichoke hearts – packed in water, not marinated
1 can (4 oz) diced green chiles  - if you like it mild, or jalapenos if you like it very warm
1 cup mayo
1 cup grated parmesan cheese

Dice artichoke hearts and place all ingredients in a medium sauce pan. Warm on stove until cheese is melted.  Stir occasionally.  Serve with wheat thins or tortilla chips.

1 loaf French Bread – cut into 1 inch squares, which is about 12 cups
1 package cream cheese cut into small cubes
8 large eggs
2 ½ cups of milk
6 Tablespoons butter, melted, plus enough butter to prepare the baking pan
¼ cup of maple syrup
1 small jar of your favorite jam
Lightly butter a 9 x 13 baking dish.  Scatter half of the bread in the bottom of the baking dish and arrange the cubes of cream cheese on top.  Top with the remaining bread.

In a blender, combine the eggs, milk, 6 Tablespoons butter, and ¼ cups of maple syrup.  Process until well blended.  Pour this mixture evenly over the bread and cream cheese.  Using a spatula, lightly press the bread down to moisten it.  Drop the teaspoons of jam over the top.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350. Bake until the center is set and edges are golden brown.  35-40 minutes.  Cool  for 5 minutes so it can set up before serving.  Serve with your favorite syrup.

Coconut Syrup
½ C. Buttermilk
1 stick of butter
1 c. sugar
Combine above ingredients and bring to a boil.  Remove from heat and add:
½ t. baking soda
½ t. coconut flavoring

Join us on Thursday the 29th for the second annual Human to Machine Interface seminar at Rain. This is a free event for Rain employees and friends of Rain (former employees, clients, family). The seminar will kickoff around 3pm in the afternoon and go until the last person has staggered out our doors the following morning. We will be joined again this year by the Soap McTavish, but will also be hearing plenty from Sasha.

This year’s topics include some similar topics from last year, but this year we add some additional topics, like:

• Team building for the hipster/minimalist (knifes and riot shields only)
• Multitasking and strategic pivoting when sleep deprived
• Managing distractions (avoiding phone calls from home demanding to know when you’re going to be done)

No RSVP necessary. Food will be provided around 5. Come anytime after 3pm. Leave whenever. Knock on the North door when you arrive. BYOH.

1 box corn chex cereal
1 1/2- 2 bags semi sweet chocolate chips
3/4 cube butter
1 1/2 cups peanut butter (not chunky)
1 tsp. Vanilla
1 bag powdered sugar

•In a microwave safe bowl add chocolate chips, butter and peanut butter and microwave in 30 second intervals and stir until melted. Add vanilla and stir. In large bowl add chex mix and coat with chocolate/peanut butter mixture. Stir until chex is well coated. In a large ziplock bag add 2 cups powdered sugar and 3-4 cups chocolate coated chex. Blow into bag and seal tight and shake until chex is covered in powdered sugar. (if there’s too much powered sugar…add more chex and vice versa!)

Traditional holiday and sunday meal at the Hatch house.

2 – table spoons of olive oil
1 – 32 oz. can Crusted Tomatoes
1 – 32 oz. can Tomato Sauce
1 bulb crushed garlic
1 chopped onion
1 sprig of basil
1 sprig of mint
1 tbs of Italian seasonings
6 – italian sausages – cooked before adding to the sauce.

Saute the crushed garlic in the olive oil in a large cooking pot. Add the crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce over low-medium heat. In a separate pan cook the chopped onions  in a pan but do not caramelize or burn them. Pour the contents into the sauce. In a separate pan cook the italian sausage in the small pan that you cooked the onions in. Then add them also to the sauce.

Meatballs
1 lb. of ground beef
1/2 cup of italian bread crumbs
1 egg mixed in.
1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese
1 dash of salt & pepper

Dampen the bread crumbs on a small plate. Then mix all the ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Use your hands to roll the meat balls into small to medium sized balls. Bake meat balls in oven for 10 minutes on a cookie sheet. Add the meat balls to the sauce. Continue to cook the sauce for another 2-4 hours. We will usually cook it overnight. The sauce is always better on the second day. This will make the sausage tender as my famous slow cooked ribs.

Server over spaghetti noodles or linguini. Goes good with garlic bread and salad.

“Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line” Translated, I have never tempted fate by trying to improvise. The recipe has taken 17 years to wrangle out of Nicosia family’s grasp – so enjoy! Ciao.