Inside the Web Developer Mind

We love our developers, and just like the glimpse we gave into the PPC mind, we wanted to give everyone a glimpse into how developers view their surroundings.

Colleagues

PPC -  always want “just one more conversion code” on the thank you page

SEO - want meta titles and descriptions for every single page, and preferably text instead of images every time

Designers - drive us crazy with one-pixel design tweaks

Web Analysts - finally, someone who sort of has an inkling of what I do all day

Sales People - ask us to explain to a client, one more time, what open source software is

Project Managers - heroic when they keep us from ever having to talk to clients; dismal when they force us to talk to clients

Everybody - assumes we can “work it out” in the development phase

Web process:

IA - a silly flowchart; better presented as a nested unordered list in HTML

Wireframes - where dreams are dreamed without consulting us on the feasibility of building the dream; better presented as a set of HTML pages

Project plans - basically irrelevant documents that have changed a dozen times before a project actually gets to the development phase

Undocumented code - code written by the insecure or the lazy; should have their keyboard taken away

Tools of the trade:

Git - BFF, saves us when we accidentally delete files (not that we do that)

Photoshop - the beast that we’re forced to open when a designer complains that a graphic isn’t aligned according to the comp

IE - the bane of our existence

Browserstack - makes IE a little more bearable, because we don’t actually have to run IE on our machines

Typekit, cufon, sifr - the various hacks we rely on to display the “correct” fonts to hapless visitors who only have Arial installed on their computer

What we think about other developers (not you, of course):

Coders who write mile-long functions - a shame to the profession

People who post "this really awesome plugin, check it out" but the code is minified and obfuscated so you can't fix the bugs in it - endlessly annoying

Posters on stackoverflow.com - our heroes, because they solve every problem we've ever encountered