Karl's Blog

Last Monday I spoke at the HTML5 Developer Conference in SF. I had the opportunity to share some of the practices used in our Front-end team at Eventbrite. A more complete blog post is coming soon…

I’ve been meditating on the definition of the word project, and how that applies on my work days. I’m getting to the conclusion that the english definition doesn’t fit the real word, at least not on the web development field.

Wordreference

Project – an enterprise carefully planned to achieve a particular aim

I disagree on that one, part of the project usually is to find the particular aim of that project :).

Wikipedia

A project in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

Let’s take the carefully planned and change it to planned only, just to make it more compatible with the majority of the projects out there. I agree with the guys from 37 signals that planning is 100% guessing, and saying that you carefully guessed how long the project will take to be done is kind of nonsense.

The free online dictionary

An undertaking requiring concerted effort.

Ok, this is good, but it still lacks on some details.

My definition

First, let’s see what we can learn about the characteristics of the majority of projects.
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Last week I read an interesting post called Hiring Front-End Engineers, in this article Chris Zacharias talks about his experience on hiring Front-End Engineers for Youtube. Basically he’s saying how hard it is to find good professionals for this position. One of the reasons is that good Front-End developers must know JavaScript, not only jQuery.

Well, that made me think about what kind of skills should I focus on for my career. I would say that I’m a advanced JavaScript programmer, but I also can say that since I’ve been working with jQuery so much, I’m becoming an advanced jQuery programmer. And my question is: is that good or bad? (more…)

I’ve worked with a lot of people who claimed to perfectionists (I say claim because I don’t actually believe they exist) and I developed an unlikeness felling about working with them. They turn my work days into stressful days and projects into less profitable projects. And no, I don’t believe they end up with perfect projects… here are the reasons.

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Today Bonzzay (The web development company I run together with 3 other partners) released the first Beta version of DecidoKit. It’s a social network linked with Facebook designed to help people make decisions. We are working on improvements and soon we will start releasing more features. (more…)

Ok, here I am to announce my new blog, I hope that at least some information here will be useful for any developer out there, in case that happens please comment to let me know I’m on the right track.

The web today is moving to the open source mentality. I believe that’s great that developers all over the world can share code and make someone’s job easier, but of course it isn’t only about receiving. That’s where this Blog idea started, it’s my need to share my knowledge with others.