Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

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.

I was recently asked by a close friend for some career advice. They're in a good job with a good salary and good long-term prospects, but that's it really. It's just good. When I asked them about what they really wanted to do as a career they simply had no idea. All my friend knew was they didn't want to do the job they're doing at the moment.

If I was asked the same question about what I wanted to do in the future I know what my answer would be and it's not building web applications. It's not my strength though, which is why I continue to do what I do today. I haven't completely discounted the idea of doing my ideal job, but then things change so fast now. Next year's dream job could change over time and evolve into something else.

It's part of the world we live in now. Everything moves at such a fast pace and things are changing constantly. There's is no job for life anymore. And yet there's plenty of opportunities for people with even the remotest idea of a new business. There's so much that people can do from their own homes, that the dream job that they have now is within reach. How long would that career last though?

I've no idea if my dream job will still be around in 10 or 20 years but it would be great if it was. Jobs for life are very few and far between now, but in their place are more opportunities for individuals than ever before.

Back to my friend who I give this advice.

If you want to make a career and living that plays to your strengths, then look beyond what you do at the moment, and try and apply your strengths to other roles and positions out with your comfort zone.

Identifying what you really want to do is key too. Without knowing what direction you want to head in, there's no way of making the first step in the right direction.

I'm not a career advisor, but it's was the best advice I could come up with for them. If you were in a similar position, what advice would you give to someone looking to change their career but not knowing what they truly wanted to do?

Today hasn't been a good day. It started going wrong before lunch-time with crossed wires with a client and then after that the plan for the day had to be drastically altered to include work for a deadline. From there on in it was a downward spiral.

These days happen. They don't happen very often but when they do, they can suck the life out of you. It's like having a little Dementor over your shoulder that strips away all the good plans that had been made for the day.

Tomorrow is another day though, and while I also had plans for tomorrow it looks like they will need to be re-shuffled to take into account this pressing work. At least now though I know what to expect from tomorrow and I can adjust accordingly.

Marked 2 - An Essential Markdown Viewer

Markdown. It's become so engrained in my workflow that I barely think about the syntax now. This post is being written in Markdown, as does most other things I write. To support this markup I need tools that are not just Markdown compatible, but champions of Markdown. Marked 2 is one such tool.

Marked 2 is an OS X markdown viewer. If it sounds like Marked 2 only does one thing, you're wrong. There's more to this app than simply viewing a file.

Many Markdown viewers and editors give just the basics of viewing Markdown. The markup formatted as HTML with your choice of theme to make it all pretty to look at it. Marked 2 does this too, but it also does so much more.

More Statistics

We've all the seen the word count feature on lots of editors. In fact I would say that almost all editors have this feature included in them. Marked 2 includes a word count for your document, but it also other statistics:

  • Character count
  • Paragraph count
  • Sentence count
  • Reading time
  • Average words per sentence
  • Average syllables per work
  • Reading ease

That's not all of them as well, there's more, but you get the idea. The great thing about the statistics is that on Marked 2 you can leave this pane on the app open and it will update the statistics as you type.

Probably not a good idea to be continually looking at this as you type, but periodically I like to see how much progress I've made and whether my editing has improved my document.

Excellent Keyword Analysis

You can highlight repeated keywords from your writing, which will highlight those keywords in pink. Once you have done this you can also click those keywords to darken the rest of the document so that you can see only the keyword you clicked and where it is repeated in your document.

During this view you can also zoom out from your document and get an overall view of your document with those keywords still highlighted.

I've been using this to replace poor choices of words and replace them with better choices. The keyword analysis can also be customised so that you can include words that you want to avoid when writing.

Lots of Preferences

My blog is a static website that is regenerated each time I deploy it. However before I publish a post, I use Marked 2 to preview my post to check everything is where it should be and that it reads well enough.

Octopress posts are markdown files themselves, but they contain a section of YAML at the start that contains details like the title of the post, the published date and any categories I want the post to be assigned to. Marked 2 has a preference for striping YAML from your document before it converts it for you so that you can view the content of your post without the messy distraction of YAML.

There are tons of other peferences as well covering window behaviour, choice of Markdown library, style settings and even settings to adjust how the document will print.

Use Your Favourite Editor

I'm a Sublime Text user for both writing code and blog posts. I've tried a few other editors, but with shortcut keys that I have memorised, it's hard to use anything else but Sublime Text. Marked 2 is great in that if I am viewing a file, it has a shortcut key that you can change to switch to your preferred text editor, where it will open up your document, ready for you to edit it.

On the flip side there is also a plugin for Sublime Text that will preview your document in Marked 2.

Easy Publishing

Marked 2 also supports a number of file types that you can export too. These are the most common document formats like PDF, DOC and ODT. As nice as Markdown is to write with, sending a Markdown document to someone who isn't familiar with the markup might struggle a bit. So it's nice to have the choice to export your document to a more friendly file type for everyone.

I've yet to try this myself but Marked 2 also includes support for the Leanpub publishing platform. lets you publish your document to Leanpub. This is great as it makes the journey to self-publication that little bit easier.

A Power Tool

Marked 2 isn't just a Markdown viewer, it's a Markdown viewer on steroids. A power tool. This is why I have Marked 2 running all day long on my second screen.

I've been continually tweaking the preferences as I go along to get the right environment for me to write in. It also doubles up as a document viewer for some lookup documents that I use on a daily basis.

Marked 2 offers so much more than just being a viewer and for me it's been money well spent on a product that gets used on a daily basis.