StudyShuffle is on twitter at @StudyShuffle and you can follow Noah at @noahlitvin

Related posts:

1. Interview with Upload Robots
2. Interview with Zac Gordon
3. Interview with Cennydd Bowles on Undercover UX Design

It’s not easy starting out if you’re under 21. Here are some examples of barriers I’ve met since starting out, and am still experiencing:

• I wanted to ask people for help when I was 14 and learning about web design, but I was too scared because of all the negative comments I read on forums in response to young people asking questions. This later spurred me on to create Scrunchup.
• My first geek meetup in a pub when I was 17. I had to bring fake ID.
• I couldn’t get a job after leaving school because employers don’t like hiring 18 year olds, despite their capabilities (which is why I went freelance).
• When I was 19, I turned up at a book club that was held in an over 21s bar and couldn’t get in so I had to go home.
• Next year is the first year I can go to SXSW. The cost of the ticket, flights and accommodation exceed £1,000, and as you have to be over 21 to get into any pubs in the US, I didn’t want to be sulking in my hotel room every evening unable to join in with the social events. You would not believe what torture it is reading tweets about how great it is every year.
• When I was freelancing, I did a pitch to a law firm. They said my ideas were better and less expensive than the other guy who had pitched, but that the MD wouldn’t feel comfortable working with someone so young, so I didn’t get the job.

So it’s no wonder that the A List Apart survey for 2009 shows 47.1% of web designers aged 18 or under believe there is an age bias.

When I interviewed Nick and David who set up Upload Robots when they were in 5th grade, I asked them whether they thought their age has been a help or a hinderance to their work.

I think that it was both a hindrance and a benefit to the project. Being so young, VC backing was not an option as it’s too risky to invest in a couple highschoolers. We also have to constantly conceal our age because we are dealing with people’s important documents, and they might not trust us because people, including ourselves, are inherently ageist.

In a lot of online games, women will choose a gender neutral username or character to avoid abuse and judgement from other players. It’s very sad that people in the real world should have to conceal their age so that people take them seriously. We have a lot of young people in this industry (1.7% are 18 or under according to the A List Apart Survey, which is almost 2 in 100), and I imagine that number will increase over the next few years.

I’ve experienced age bias a lot more since I started speaking. I’ve also experienced a lot more sexist comments directed at me, but that doesn’t bother me as much because there are so many people who are aware of it and will call them out on it.

What frustrates me the most is that there are people who won’t even bother to listen to what I’m talking about, and will judge purely on appearances. When I published my talk on my experience of web design being taught in the curriculum, I had people criticising me for trying to “fix everything”, but the last lines of my talk are “I don’t know how to fix this”. I was just presenting a problem, and at this stage I’m not offering solutions because I don’t know what they are.

I’m trying to keep a positive mind, after all, these are problems that will go away as I get older. Also, it can sometimes help because it makes people remember you, as I wrote about in a post called Iron Lung last year. I’m just frustrated on behalf of everyone who is starting out young and having to experience what I have gone through. We need to be concious that there are some very young people doing web design, and that judging them on stereotypes is unacceptable.

There are some great people doing amazing things, and they deserve the opportunity to talk about them without the fear of discrimination. There’s Matt Mullenweg who set up WordPress before he was old enough to buy a drink in his country. James Proud who I met when he was 18, and he’d set up this amazing site called Giglocator. Joe Holdcroft, also 18, who is the senior developer where I work. Nick and David set up Upload Robots who we interviewed for Scrunchup. The best thing is, none of them conform to any of the negative stereotypes associated with young developers.

No related posts.

We’ll assume here that the partnership is two people, but of course you can have larger partnerships. Just be wary of putting too many cooks in your kitchen, because you won’t get many chances at getting that particular broth right.

Why bother?

There are a whole bunch of reasons why creating a partnership can be a better strategy than going it alone.

Two heads are better than one

You’ll have someone else to bounce ideas around with, which will help weed out the ridiculous ideas, and nourish the good ones. Every time you come up against a design or coding challenge, you’ll have your partner to lean on and mull it over with. You know how when you explain the problem you’re having, suddenly you realise what the solution is before the person you’re explaining it to has even had a chance to open their mouth? It’s great when that happens, and it will be part of jobs as partners to be those mute sounding boards for each other. Two heads are better than one in pretty much every challenging situation you’re going to face.

Double the resources

With two people, you’re better resourced for bigger chunks of work that come your way. Providing you have overlapping skill sets (and more on that in a while), that’s two people who can be working on something, greatly increasing your productivity.

Looking bigger and meaner

While you won’t have the weight of an established agency, having two people on the team will inspire a little more confidence in potential clients. After all, you can’t be a complete lunatic because you’ve convinced someone else to work with you, and the random chance of two lunatics pairing in the same place is much lower.

Teach me teach you

Working alone means that you’re solely responsible for honing your abilities. While it’s important to spend time reading and practising your techniques by yourself, it’s much faster to learn directly from someone else who’s already experienced in the area. Learning and feeding off each other’s knowledge is one of the key strengths of every small close-knit team.

Broader skill set

Unless you’re actual clones of each other, there’ll be something that one of you does better than the other. Picture the Venn diagram of your talents combined – that super set is your offering to the market, and it will enable you to go after broader end-to-end projects, rather than smaller projects, or just segments of the larger ones.

Howdy Partner

While working alone as a freelancer certainly has the potential to send you a bit crazy at times, that’s nothing compared to what working with one person who you grow to despise will do to you. It’s absolutely critical that you choose to partner with someone that you can work with day in day out through the hard times and the good.

In fact, it’s more important that you find someone you can have a great working relationship with than it is to find someone who is a master in their field, but a complete doucheface to work with. You can always develop your respective skills to become masters, but you can’t change your personalities anything like as easily.

It’s a good idea to partner with someone that you’ve worked with quite extensively in the past so that you know they’re fun to work with and that you’ll have great professional chemistry. If you’re currently at a large company and you’re thinking of breaking off and freelancing, maybe there’s someone else there in your team who you know you work well with and would be a great business partner. Perhaps you’re already freelancing and you’ve shared projects with another freelancer on a few occasions and it all went really well. Just don’t pluck someone at random off a freelancer project auction site or approach people purely on the basis of their CVs or portfolios – work with them in some capacity first.

There’s also the question of skill sets. If you and your partner are both expert UI designers, you’ll be able to take on bigger pure UI design projects, you’ll probably have to turn away projects that aren’t based on pure UI design work. If one of you is a UI designer and the other a wizard developer, you can go after the larger projects that involve both disciplines and which are generally better paying.

The implications of a partnership

The dynamic

Being in a partnership is not the same as being in a group of freelancers who happen to work together, even if you’re not working in the same room as your business partner. Some freelancers choose the solo path because they thrive in that solitude, and if you really need to be completely alone to be productive then a partnership might not work for you. That said, a small partnership is typically still more relaxed and flexible than an agency or studio with a couple of handfuls of people working together, so it’s a good balance.

Cash is king

Another very important point to consider is the financial impact of having two people to pay. All the work you do will need to generate enough money to cover two salaries which can make it tough, especially when you’re starting out. This makes it harder to get the ball rolling for a partnership than a freelancer, because you’ll need bigger cash buffers and slightly better paying projects right from the outset. Make sure you take all of this into account when you make your cashflow projections, which of course you’ll do with religious devotion, won’t you. Won’t you?

Branding

You’ll also need to work a bit harder on your brand. As a freelancer, you can get away with using your name as your brand and identity. That can work for partnerships as well (combining your names), but you might be better off going a bit further and conjure up a new name for your venture.

Summarising

Partnerships can be a more attractive option than going out on your own as a freelancer, but you need to be wary of a few unique challenges that can arise when you try and work with someone else on a small business scale. If you have any questions about specific aspects of partnering, feel free to post them in the comments below, or get in touch with me directly. Good luck, however you choose to work!

Related posts:

1. Ageism

Introduction

Paul Boag: Hello and welcome to boagworld.com, well, at least, a micro-mini little segment of boagworld.com which is a podcast for all those involved in designing, developing and running websites on a daily basis, but this episode for the guys at scrunchup.com. We said that we would do a little bit for their site, talking about a few things that are relevant to people starting out in web design, those of you that maybe are students looking to move into web design. We think that ScrunchUp is going to be a great site and we want to support it loads. So basically they’ve asked us to look at a couple of issues today. Number 1 is what makes a good portfolio, and 2nd we’re going to look at how we go about selecting employees, what gets you hired I guess is the question there. Joining me as always on our podcast is Marcus Lillington, hello Marcus!

Marcus Lillington: Hello Paul, how are you? I’ll be very amazed if this is a very small mini-micro boagworld because they never are!

Paul Boag: Oh, it’s gotta be shorter than we normally do, because that would just be so wrong! So.. you’re sitting there scribbling notes aren’t you.

Marcus Lillington: I’m finished!

Paul Boag: You’ve finished? So you’re ready to go? Ok, that’s good.

Portfolios

Paul Boag: So let’s talk first about what makes a good portfolio. Now, I’ve made a few notes on this one, this is kind of my area of expertise. Marcus is going to do the hiring area because I’m notoriously bad at selecting people. I’m a very poor judge of character and think everybody is wonderful, whilst Marcus is cynical and, you know, and thinks the worst of everybody, so he’s much better suited to that kind of thing…

Marcus Lillington: Oddly, I have to say that actually, we’re probably we’re more the other way round in real life, but when it comes to interviews you’re absolutely right.

Paul Boag: Yeah, it’s weird isn’t it. Anyway, let’s look at what makes a good portfolio. So, a little bit of advice; you’re creating a portfolio, you want to get yourself hired, so what do you do?

Quality not Quantity

Paul Boag: Right, first of all, quality not quantity. So, look, as an employer, both myself and Marcus employ graduate web designers all the time or new web designers all the time, and we recognise you’re not going to have a lot of work, you’re not going to have done a lot by this stage, so it’s quality that matters, and if you can just show me 2 or 3 pieces of work that are really good quality, that’s enough, we don’t need to see loads.

Client Work

Paul Boag: Now, what is useful is if you can show me real commercial work done for real clients. Now admittedly you might not be able to get anyone to actually pay you money at this stage, but even if you can do some work for a charity, a friend’s business or anything like that, having a real client is really useful from our perspective because it tells us quite a lot that you don’t get told on personal projects. So try and at least have something in your portfolio that is real commercial work.

Background Information

Paul Boag: Also, I’m not just interested in pretty pictures. Your portfolio, if it’s full of nice designs, or to be honest, if you’re a coder, nice code, you know, that’s nothing, that doesn’t tell us enough. What I’m interested in is the background information on the project. I want to know what the aims of the project were, and what the exact nature of the work you were doing was. So I need to know that background information to be able to judge whether you’ve done a good job or not in the portfolio piece. So make sure you provide some of that information as well.

Good Understanding of Code

Paul Boag: Certainly, as well, even for designers as well as developers, I want to see a good understanding of code. I want to see nice, semantic markup, I want to see that you avoided hacks, and also, a bit of understanding of JavaScript wouldn’t hurt as well. So, you know, a real kind of knowledge. Now, obviously, if we’re hiring developers here, then I want to see that you’ve got an understanding of server-side code as well, not necessarily that you know the specific language that I want you to code in, but that you’ve certainly got an understanding in object oriented programming and all those kinds of things. I’m going to be careful here because I’m not a developer so I’m going to show my ignorance.

Marcus Lillington: (laughs mockingly)

Design Fundamentals

Paul Boag: From a designer’s point of view, I want to see that you’ve got an understanding of design basics, and to be honest, I quite want to see this from developers, because, developers end up doing a bit of design in the same way that designers end up doing a little bit of development, so, in the same way as it’s important that a designer understands code, and does nice semantic markup blah blah blah, you know, I kind of want a basic understanding of design from a developer as well. But certainly from designers I need to see that you’ve got a good grasp of things like white space, typography, use of grids.

Usability and Interactive Design

Paul Boag: I also want everybody I hire to have a good understanding of usability. Usability is core to what we do as a company, we need to know that you really grasp that, and grasp the importance of user-centric design. Also, I need to see that you’ve got a grasp of interactive design. Some of the graduates that we see are very print orientated and are thinking from a print perspective. That’s not enough when it comes to the web, the web is a very interactive medium, it’s about what users click on, what happens when they click on it, you know, how’s the interface going to respond to them, so it needs to be a lot more than just pretty pictures.

Consideration

Paul Boag: I think what probably sums it up most is what I’m looking for is a portfolio full of stuff that is considered and understated and isn’t flashy design, and I don’t mean the use of Flash, I’m talking about showing off. I want to see a design that meets the brief, that is simple, easy to use, and intuitive. So, that’s the kind of thing that I’m looking for from a portfolio. Have you got anything that you want to add to that one, Marcus?

Marcus Lillington: Errmm.. no, not really. Obviously, quite a lot of the things I’m going to say kind of overlap with what you’ve said, so I guess I have, but I’ll come to that in a bit.

Paul Boag: Ok, go on then, you talk a little bit about hiring.

Hiring

Marcus Lillington: Ok, sure. So, what makes you employable, why are you going to win the job over people with similar qualifications, that kind of thing.. I mean, talking about qualifications, I’ll dive into the one that.. ermm.. er..

Paul Boag: (giggles)

Degrees

Marcus Lillington: People can end up having endless discussions about education, do you need a degree, that kind of thing, and simple answer to that one is no you don’t need a degree. Basically, a university education teaches people to think analytically, so if you’ve come out at the other end of university with a degree of, you know, 2:1 in whatever really, it just shows that you can apply yourself and you can think analytically. So, it’s a box ticked I suppose, but it’s not the be all and end all.

Be Prepared

Marcus Lillington: Basically the next point I’ve got here is about being prepared to show examples of work, so obviously your portfolio which is something Paul’s just talked about, but it can also include non web design related stuff. Just show that you’re someone that’s done various.. you know, "I’ve done this piece of work" or "I worked for a charity" or whatever, that kind of thing just shows that you’ve got the ability to work hard and apply yourself, all those kind of things. Let’s face it, often a job is.. you’ve got to knuckle down and get on with it, it’s not all thinking up creative ideas, and you’ve got to show that you’ve got the ability to be able to knuckle down I guess.

Tests

Marcus Lillington: A separate point here, be prepared to be tested. We don’t test our designers as such, but we have a standard test for all developers we employ, so don’t be surprised if you’re asked to do some kind of test.

Keenness

Marcus Lillington: I guess the main thing, the main thing that’s going to differentiate you from other applicants would be keenness. Just the fact that you’re in love with what you do, Paul’s talked many times in the past about blogging, joining in with forums about web design, that kind of thing. Obviously if you do this to get a job, then that’s not genuine. But if it’s something that you do and you enjoy, that will come shining through. I’m thinking of all the people we have employed, and usually they end up going off in a long diatribe about how much they love what they do, and it’s obvious, by the end of it, this is someone that’s going to work hard because they like what they do, be it design, be it development.

Paul Boag: It’s not actually… you don’t want someone sitting there and going "oh yes, I love web design" because that sounds false. It’s when you get onto a subject, I don’t know, frameworks, right, whether you should use a CSS framework, and this person is really passionate. Either way, even if they disagree with me, even if they think frameworks are the best thing since sliced bread, and I’m not a great fan of them, that doesn’t matter, that wouldn’t put me off hiring them, it’s the fact that they’re passionate and enthusiastic and have got an opinion that matters to me.

Marcus Lillington: I’ve written down here "genuine", and that’s what I mean here. Not everyone’s the same, we’re not all great talkers or wonderful orators and we can express ourselves beautifully and that kind of thing, but you can always tell when someone is genuinely passionate about something, and if you are, that will shine through.

Thumbs up, Thumbs down

Marcus Lillington: The last thing I was going to say is how.. this is something that I heard the guys at Adaptive Path talk about at last year’s SXSW (South by South West) conference, and it really captivated me. When they interview someone, they won’t go into a long chat about will they, won’t they, etc. The first thing they do is the people who were interviewing the applicant, they either.. basically it’s thumbs up, thumbs down or thumbs to the side. And basically, if it’s thumbs up, they’re in, no discussion, thumbs down, they’re out, no discussion. So only if someone has got their thumb on the side there will be any discussion about it. Now, all I would say about that, is how would you feel during an interview knowing that that’s what’s going to happen at the end? Put people in a position where they are going to talk passionately about what they love. So, yeah.

Conclusion

Paul Boag: Ok, that’s hopefully useful stuff and that’s what the great powers at ScrunchUp were actually after, I don’t know.

Marcus Lillington: (laughs) Probably not!

Paul Boag: But there you go, that’s what you’ve got, I hope it’s useful, and, yeah, good on the guys for taking on and doing ScrunchUp, and I wish them all the best in the future. Goodbye from us at Boagworld!

Related posts:

1. Starting out in Web Development
2. The Path to Epic Success
3. Ageism

Photo by Paopix

It often feels like you’ve got to try twice as hard at being professional to make up for your age. People often assume that because you’re young, you’re the typical teenage stereotype – sitting in your room bashing out table-based websites for quick money, not caring about the meaning of code you churn out as long as the site looks ok. I would like to point out that this is not you, because you have come to this site to learn more about the industry and how to do things better. But how do you get it across to other people that you are not that stereotype?

What follows are some mistakes that not just young people make, but also people who have been in the industry for years. Many of these have tripped me up along the way.

Don’t pretend to be something you’re not

If you have a website, make sure the ‘about me’ page has information about you, about what you do and how long you’ve been doing it. This is usually the first thing that people want to know when they visit your site. Put a photo up to prove you’re a real person. If you’re studying, say it.

Don’t make out you’re more than one person. Never, ever use “we” when you mean “I”. There’s nothing wrong with being a one-man-band, and making out you’re more than that will cause problems later on. Also, be up front about your age early on…

Tell people how old you are

Avoid an uncomfortable situation later on and let the client/potential client know how old you are. If you don’t tell them and they find out later on, they may think you’ve been deceiving them. They may even walk away from the project (leaving you out of pocket).

It can feel really unfair when someone turns you down because of your age (this has happened to me a couple of times), but you’ve got to accept it and move on. In a few cases, my age has been a big advantage. Some clients perceive me as some sort of computer whisperer (aren’t all teenagers?!). I’ve even given advice to computer technicians who have been so impressed, they’ve taken a load of my business cards and handed them out to their clients.

Don’t take on too much work

Photo by Coldcut Crew

If all goes well, you may find you’re so successful that you’re constantly being asked to do work for people. This is where, if you’re not careful, it can all go horribly wrong.

Firstly, make sure you have enough time to complete these projects. Are you still studying? Have you made allowances this? What if you become ill?

It’s a good idea to break down projects into stages and work out the number of hours each stage will take. Then triple it. In my experience, a project will take 2 to 3 times longer than you think it will take. As you get more experienced, you’ll be able to work faster.

Don’t be afraid to turn work down. Politely say that you’re very sorry but you’ve got a lot of work on at the moment, and that you will get back in contact with them when things calm down in a few weeks to see if they would still like your help. Or if you’re a really nice person and know someone who is in need of some work, recommend they contact them.

Watch out for clients who will rip you off

Some clients may want to take advantage of your age, and they’ll either be really bad at paying you, or get you to do more work than you’ve agreed. Other web design companies can be the worst offenders if you do freelance work with them. Make sure your invoices state that they need to be paid within 30 days, and don’t be scared to follow up late payments.

Write everything down and confirm it with the client. If they’re asking for more than you’d originally agreed to charge them, tell them this. It’s vital to write a specification before you start work so both yourself and the client know where you stand.

Don’t Undervalue Yourself

Don’t lead yourself down a slippery slope by undercharging. I have made this mistake too many times, and from it I learnt that by undercharging, I am undervaluing the work I do. If you charge too little, people will assume you’re not very experienced at what you do. However, at the same time you’ve got to be careful not to tip the scales the other way.

But Don’t Overcharge

You are not a web agency, and if you’re just starting out, you don’t have the experience or the running costs to justify charging a lot of money yet.

Use qualitative calculations when working out how much you should charge. A good way of finding out how much you should charge is by using the Freelance Switch web calculator. this calculates an hourly wage, and you can increase this wage as you become more experienced and your running costs become higher.

Do your paperwork

Photo by Videolux

If you’re working as a freelancer, you need to contact HMRC (her majesty’s revenues and customs) to tell them you’re self-employed. This is no biggie, you just need to fill out a form, and pay national insurance contributions every 3 months. Otherwise they might fine you for earning money and not telling them.

You must must must keep receipts for everything. Invoices (your own and other peoples), travel expenses when meeting clients, software and phone bills. I’d recommend attending a free Business Link course on this (see the paragraph on milking it).

I’d strongly recommend writing down how long everything takes you to do so you can learn for estimating a project next time.

Don’t blame the tools… Too much.

Just because you use GIMP to make sites doesn’t mean you’re a bad designer. It sucks not being able to afford CS4, but having amazing software doesn’t make you a good designer. Know your limitations, and know your software, whatever you use. I’m still discovering things I didn’t even know I could do with Fireworks, and I’ve used it practically every day for the last 3 years.

Don’t use the same website that you market your services on as you do to blog about getting drunk

If looking professional is important to you, make sure your online life projects that. If the website you use to attract client contains feeds from Twitter, Facebook or Flickr, make sure the content you put up there projects the same image you want to convey.

I’ve visited too many portfolio sites where people plug in their Twitter feeds, and tweet inappropriate things about their clients.

And related to this…

Get to grips wiv gramma an spellin an stuff.

Be professional with all communication with your clients. It reflects badly on you if you’re spelling is sloppy, and makes it look like you don’t care. We’re not all perfect, but take a minute to spell check your emails and webpages before publishing them.

If you’re terrible at spelling and grammar, use the phone more, but make sure you write everything down (see being ripped off).

Plan ahead

Think about what you’re going to be doing in 6 months time. Will you be heading off to uni? What will you do if a client phones you up in a year asking for changes, or saying their site is down or their email is down. Remember that you are taking responsibility for part of the functioning of their business. It’s incredibly unfair and unprofessional to neglect them 6 months down the line because you don’t feel like doing it any more. If you decide web design isn’t for you, make sure your clients are given all the information they need to hand over to someone else.

Be realistic

You’re not going to have the opportunity to redesign Coca-cola any time soon. Start small.

Thinking “it’s good enough”

This is a very difficult lesson to learn. There are so many terrible websites out there, and it’s easy to compare your sites to these and think “hey, the sites I make are a lot better than some of this rubbish”. Do you want to make average websites, or do you want to make amazing websites? Aim to make sites that stretch your abilities, that make you learn new techniques and at the same time perfect the old ones.

Find out what’s important in the industry

Well, you’re reading this, so you obviously care about the industry. I’d really recommend making an effort to attend any web-related meetups too. This can be difficult for cash-strapped students, especially if the events are far away or require a stay in a hotel. When I started out, I really wanted to attend the Future of Web Design conference in London. There was no way I could afford it, so I asked my school if they could help me with the ticket cost (in return for redesigning their website) and they did!

Don’t forget to milk it ;)

Photo by Tim Welbourn

Often schools have budgets set aside for this sort of thing. If you’re in secondary school, I’d recommend talking to an IT teacher and showing them the details of the conference. Say you’d represent the school (they love it when you say that). If they say no, it may be worth emailing the conference organizers to explain your situation and ask if they could offer you a student discount, or if you could volunteer and help them set up.

Enjoy what you do

Finally, you need to enjoy what you do to be successful.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Herman Cain

Related posts:

1. Employment and Portfolios

Further education or employment?

This was a major dilemma I came across when I decided I wanted to get into web development. Because the nature of this industry is fast paced, everything moves too fast for the education system to keep up with. But does this mean that the education system (in terms of technology) is redundant? Well I’m still not sure. But I will tell you my trail of thought.

• By the time I completed the course the technology would be out of date
• I can’t motivate myself to work at a place which I wouldn’t have much benefit from
• I wanted to learn and earn
• I work better teaching myself

Employment it is!

There is one type of employment that works really well in this industry. Apprenticeships. Most people think apprenticeships are just for plumbers and electricians, but its a great way to see what the real world is like. I started work (and still work there to this day) at Dorset County Council doing web applications with geographic/spatial data. But don’t think that I just worked 9-5. As soon as I knew enough about web development I started programming in my spare time.

Challenge yourself

It’s easy enough to pick up a programming language and develop a simple website, but how do you actually stamp your mark on the industry? You need to push yourself. My first website was a social network complete with video uploads, forums, chat rooms and everything. All I knew before I started the project was how to insert something into a database table and how to grab a value from a form (which I learnt on the job).

Keep going

Once you have a web app or two, just keep up the momentum. I currently have about 3 app ideas on the go at the same time.  This way I keep my head in the game, and learn about new technologies and methods. Plus I am working up quite a large portfolio to help me when I apply for another job.

Put yourself out there

When I created FootyTweets, my largest Twitter web app to date, I wanted to put myself out there, get some buzz generated, and getting people to recognise my work and efforts. So I looked at Twitter Developer Nest and put my name down to do a talk on the service and some of the issues I have come across.

I ended up speaking at the event and got lots of people asking me about the site and got lots of contacts. I loved it so much that I went back the next time and showed off my latest web app. Where did this lead? Well on Monday (30th September 2009) I went with a bunch of people I met at the event to have a photoshoot with UK Wired magazine.

I thought back and realised that if I’d just sat at home, made web apps and didn’t put myself outside of my comfort zone, then I wouldn’t be the developer I am today.

Your opinion matters!

I’m open to all of your input so please comment away below. You can also have a look at the Twitter polls that I put together for each issue of Scrunchup.

Related posts:

1. What are the different languages?