Two Banjos At Once: The Blog

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How to demoralize your front-end developers

October 2, 2009

Tags: css, development, markup, work

Stop failing at this apparently necessary chore; I’m here to help.  I can verify that all the following techniques have worked on for me.

How to Demoralize Your Front-end Developers

1. Constantly change requirements. It’s, what, the day before the scheduled launch?  And the product doesn’t include that absolutely requisite feature you didn’t think to require until now?  Well, shoot, just demand it!  And make drastic changes to the visual and interaction design as well–where’s the glory in completion?
2. Constantly change the visual design. You took that one-day course in CSS and remember only that it was a way you could change all of a site’s visual elements from one file.  Okay, then, let’s start by making all the blue things red, and all the red things green–but only on Tuesday–wait, change them back again, make the old red things red again–and oh, all the gray things white and the white things gray, and the grayish-white things brown, on alternate weekdays.  And all the wide things “smaller” and the narrow things “a little bigger” and the tall things “a smidge shorter” and… just marvel  how enthusiastic your front-end dev grows.
3. Give them a lousy setup. Cram your developers into a spot at an unergonomic table in between the gal who has the obnoxious sound themes enabled on her workstation and the guy who spends his entire work day shouting into a speaker phone. Don’t let your devs use their preferred operating systems or software–point out that you’ve generously provided work computers exactly like your own, with that reliable ten-year-old OS and the proprietary groupware that cost you a bundle.
4. Decide midway that you need pixel-perfection in IE 6 after all. So you visited your hermit, anti-consumerist brother-in-law living in a shanty with a hand-me-down Gateway 2000 accessing the Web over intermittent dial-up, and you looked like a putz because your beta site didn’t render perfectly in Internet Explorer 6.  Well, crack the whip so he can enjoy those rounded corners, PNGs with alpha transparency, and painstakingly mitered grid layouts.
5. Critique the browser rendering against one in a different medium. Different media, you say?  Hardware?  Pshaw!  Do as I’ve actually witnessed:  hold a paper print-out of the intended design up to the monitor, and compare the rendered page unfavorably to the PDF print-out.  Remark on the differences in proportion and color.  Watch your devs writhe in either agony or amusement at your request to make the two formats identical.
6. Assign visual design tasks to your developers. Get rid of that pesky professional, and go with a leaner team equipped with mere adequacy in Web design.  Start with vague instructions to your front-end devs (“This area of the page needs to really say ‘breathy,’ but not ‘vaporous’”), and end with your looming over them, jabbing at the display of a competitor’s site on a monitor, and shouting, “See? See?!  Like this–only different!”
7. Pit your developers against each other. Break up that predictable day with a bout of office politics as bloody as any combat in the Colosseum!  Let one developer bully another, favor the least productive developer over the others, and disclose important project details only to the dev most likely to hoard the information.  When one dev leaves at 6pm to tend to the rest of his life, assign all his duties to the other one still in the office. Whatever you do, don’t let these people end up liking each other.
8. Constantly interrupt with phone calls, e-mails, IMs, or in-person meetings. You know, if you give your developers the chance to concentrate, to get into the flow of working, there’s no end of disaster which could happen:  they might  finish the tasks you’ve assigned to them, or write bug-free scripts, or finish a work day with a sense of accomplishment.  Then you’d all miss an important feature of the Development Drama:  the climactic battle in which each side slays the other in murderous frenzy.
9. Ridicule their professional opinions. Don’t listen to the nay-sayers when you describe that pop-up with autoplay Flash, animated GIFs, and blinking text you’re confident will add loads of appeal to the application.  Show them your teenaged son’s MySpace page and pointedly ask why they can’t make something like that if he can.
10. Don’t use a bug tracking system. Sheesh, you already send all those e-mails.  Why repeat yourself in some persnickety little data entry form with those dropdown things which force you to prioritize the issue?  Just repeat: everything’s critical and of highest priority.  See, easy to remember.

Hmmm, something’s missing.  What have I left out?

Comments (4)

4 Comments

1. 

   How about pay way below value because you looked at Craiglist and it looks like you can get away with it?

   Comment by Lise — October 2, 2009 @ 3:24 pm

2. 

   @Lise–good point. Another way to determine the below-market rate you’re offering is to query a bunch of obscure offshore development firms with short or nonexistent client lists.

   Comment by mejarc — October 2, 2009 @ 4:32 pm

3. 

   insist on round corners and drop downs over flash in every browser

   Comment by hrvojeb — October 16, 2009 @ 2:54 am

4. 

   @Hrvojeb–oh, thank you for the reminder! Yes–you must have challenging z-index situations, or else your front-end devs will retain full heads of hair.

   Comment by mejarc — October 16, 2009 @ 11:32 am

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This is a very short tutorial explaining how you can turn the address bar of popular Mac OS X web browser Camino into a quick search bar. I know there are widgets for searching, but I'm not comfortable with continually running such widgets on my Mac. So, I decided to find an alternative...

I find myself heading over to Dictionary.com quite a bit - I need to stop talking to people who use big words. I soon got tired of typing the URL out each time i decided to visit, so I looked for an alternative. Unfortunately, Camino doesn't allow you to customize the built-in address bar search... it comes as a Google searcher and it stays as a Google searcher. Here's my solution (and in this example I will be using Dictionary.com, but anything can be in its place):

1. Figure out the URL pattern of the site you want to search. This can be easily done by simply conducting a couple of searches and noting the similarities. With Dictionary.com, it is quite obvious. Your search results are always in this form: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/.
2. Configure Camino. Like Firefox, to configure Camino, type about:config into your address bar. If this is your first time, it may alert you... don't worry, we're not going to kill anything.
3. Filter the fields. You'll see a lot of fields and values which we don't need to worry about. Filter your results by typing "keyword" into the filter box. This will narrow the list down to two items.
4. Plug in the new values. In the keyword.URL field, you will enter in the observed search pattern. In this example, the value would be "http://www.dictionary.com/browse/". Simply double click the field and type in the new value. Now you'll actually have to enable the keyword searcher. To do this, double click the keyword.enabled field to set it to true.
5. Restart Camino. When you return - test it out! Just type a word into the address bar and hit enter, you should be taken to its result on Dictionary.com.
6. Customize it. I know not everybody will be wanting to search a dictionary. You can even customize it to search Newsvine... whatever! Unfortunately, you can only have one quick search at a time. What I would like to do is have the ability to type "d " for searching Dictionary.com or "n " for searching Newsvine, as some other browsers do. Until then, this is the next best substitute!

Currently tested (and working) on versions:

• 1.1b
• 1.0.3

Just as in Firefox.

One of my favorite Dashboard widgets, Dolor Sit Amet is a one-click custom lorem ipsum generator. Truly priceless.