Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

One aspect of freelancing that I didn't expect to be much of an issue was that of justifying buying new equipment. I already had a pretty nice setup when I started. A MacBook, an external monitor and a working keyboard and mouse. That was all I needed to get started. I didn't worry about replacing the equipment over time, it just never crossed my mind.

Then last year the MacBook started to grind down with the amount of use it was getting on a daily basis. Tests ran slow, there was little free disk space left and at the back of my mind was the thought that the MacBook was already about five years old. What if it just died on me?

So I headed down to the local Apple store and done a check over the specs of the MacBook Pros and found myself a suitable specced Pro at a good price. I had only just received payment of my first invoice and already I was spending some of it. In my head though I knew I was justified in buying a Pro. My little black MacBook was not consistently handling the amount of work I did on a daily basis. Beach balling was a common daily occurrence, so a new laptop made sense.

In the last couple of weeks though my Apple keyboard of four years has started to show signs of wearing down. Certain keys sometimes need a double press to respond. I've tried shooting compressed air in at these keys but they're still sometimes unresponsive. Time for a new keyboard.

I was simply going to replace the keyboard I had for another one of the same model. The Apple keyboard is nice but I sometimes find the compactness of it just a bit on the small side. It was time to look elsewhere and one keyboard that did catch my eye was the Logitech K811. A similar profile to my keyboard, illuminated keys and it let's you switch between three different bluetooth devices.

The only problem was the price. At just under £90 it is easily the most expensive keyboard I have considered buying. It seems a lot of money, but then I remember thinking that about my Apple keyboard which was also more expensive than a standard keyboard.

What I keep forgetting is that a keyboard is one of the tools I use on a daily basis. I use it for the whole of the working day and if I'm to consider keyboards in a higher price point then I think I am justified in spending that little bit more to get a comfortable keyboard that let's me work fluently through the day.

I would love nothing more to splash out on a new massive screen, an array of new hard drives, a new router and lots of other goodies, but these are really nice to haves. The essentials that I need such as a laptop, monitor, keyboard and mouse are the essential tools that make my working day a lot easier. It's these tools that I should consider spending a bit more of my budget on should I need too.

Social media is killing social media

In the quest to find news users for people to follow in my Netterpress newsletter, I started putting together a few scripts that would poll new accounts created on App.net and update them over the course of the week. I only filtered for accounts categorized as 'human'. I figured that this would limit some of the spam accounts I would get. At the end of the week I would sort the accounts by the number of posts made for each account and then starting hand checking each account from the top of the list looking for interesting users to include in the Netterpress newsletter.

A sound idea in theory, but when it came to checking the accounts, I was disappointed to find that most of the active accounts at the top of my list were in fact spam accounts or valid accounts entirely powered by automated feed tools. There only a handful of actual human accounts in the fifty most active accounts that I looked at last night.

I've never previously done this on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook, but given my experience on Twitter in the past it's hard to be surprised by this.

Social media is it's own worst enemy in my eyes. The very tools that make it easy for us to post from one location to different networks are the very same tools that are used to automate the posting of irrelevant and unsolicited content.

The barrier to many social networks is nothing. All the networks I have heard of are free. Even App.net has a free tier for anyone to join. It's that free entry that makes it so appealing for many, but to others they see an opportunity to post irrelevant content.

In App.net's case, there is a growing number of feed accounts appearing on the platform. While that's okay for feeds that deliver valuable content, there's no getting away from the fact that people will setup accounts to deliver unwanted content, regardless of the social network you use. It doesn't matter what social network you are a member of, there will always be spam accounts trying to dilute the pool of valued content.

I'll be checking through the data over the weekend in preparation for the next Tuesday's newsletter. Hopefully I'll be able to pull together a list of some new users to recommend to others for the next edition of Netterpress.

I would love to show one of my teachers this.

"You're a plodder. You will never amount to anything", he would say to me.

Quality and Time

I take pride in the work that I do as a web developer. I always try and deliver the best possible work that I can. If you're a developer of any kind whether it's systems, mobile, web or any other type of developer, one of your aims each day should be to deliver the best possible work you can. When we do this we take the time we need within our estimate to deliver the highest quality of code we can afford to.

Quality and time go hand in hand in this case and it doesn't just apply to programming. It applies to everything that we do. If you want to do something right, take the time to do it well.

I come up against this on almost a daily basis with my oldest son. He rushes his homework and then asks me to check it for him. Untidy writing and stupid mistakes in his arithmetic are just two hallmark traits of his rush to finish his homework. At this point I rub out all his homework, even the stuff he got right, and ask him to do again. Before he begins his homework again I tell him that rushed homework is bad homework. If he wants to get it right in the future first time, then he needs to take the time to do it properly. As with all kids he doesn't remember this advice from one day to the next and so he needs to be reminded of it daily. He's getting better and it's good to get him in into the habit of taking his time with his homework now before he starts high school.

A simply example of applying the right amount of quality and time to our work but it's amazing how often I have come up against this in a professional working environment.

I've been in this position a few times where you are expected to deliver a specific piece of work within an allotted time. The time you're given isn't adequate for the amount of work needing done. In the past I would have cut corners. I would have written code without writing tests for it, tested it through the happy path and delivered it for it's intended audience. Bear in mind that while I do this, my line manager at the time is aware of the short cuts taken and is okay with the end result. It's reminiscent of the 'live to fight another day' mantra.

I don't want to fight another day though, and a couple of years ago I remember spending weeks just putting out fire after fire. It was an unpleasant experience made worse by the fact that there was just no room for spending time to deliver quality work. At the time, the company had too much work and little resources to handle everything. So corners were cut and everyone suffered. It's not a nice experience and it's a difficult to recover from this.

I'm more aware now of the need for both quality and time when it comes to delivering your best work. I write tests for my code where I can, I take the time to refactor my code, I test it in a staging environment to check it is working as expected.

When it comes to your work, regardless of the what you do, don't forget that time can have an effect on the quality of your work. It's not a perfect world though and we don't always get the time that we need. We've all been faced with the dilemma of delivering work within a tight amount of time, but rather than letting that be the norm, let that be the exception.