First of all, in an effort to deal with blog neglect I’ve shifted my usual authoring time to before work rather than after. Afterwards there are simply too many distractions- mental, physical and… ahem… social for me to really get focused on my thoughts and get them down. Whether I can keep it up is anyone’s guess, but for now I’ve got a nice cool morning, a full battery and a patch of sunshine to write in. What else could you want?

Secondly, we had our annual reviews here at work recently, and by all accounts I did pretty well. I had to go out and get a short-term prescription for insulin to deal with much of what was said during the review, and after a rather superfluous compensation discussion (what am I going to do, argue about a raise? Oh no! You’re giving me more money! Whatever will I do!) I’m now happily sitting on a modest increase. Given that my last three places of employment didn’t really believe in “raises” per se (one of my coworkers was fired because she asked for one), it’s a welcome change.

Thirdly, we released a bunch of new content for my project, HP Print Studio yesterday, which marks our first major push for international content. Included was pretty much all of south america, so in the end it was only two new languages (Portuguese and Mexican Spanish), but given that every country can customize the application down to the last background image, rolling out those 18 new countries was no small feat.

Of course, doing a rollout of that scale showed some of the cracks in our localization strategy, so I won’t lie and say it went smoothly. I was at work until very late on wednesday resolving last minute inconsistencies, and had to give up my weekly salsa lesson/social for the project (which I find amusingly ironic- latin america, salsa… get it? . Having said that, I now have intimate knowledge on what’s broken and how to fix it, and an initial cost/benefit analysis means we might even be able to charge the client for it (though at this point I’m doing it simply for my own peace of mind).

Lastly, we had some… unfortunate downsizing at work. I won’t go into the detail of who, how and why, just to reassure my readership that I wasn’t affected (well, other than the shell shock). The reason I brought it up is because, having gone through two business evaporations, two acquisitions and a few other unfortunate staffing events, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of event handled so well.

How do I mean that…

First of all, most of my downsizing experience has been reactive, in that a business had to suddenly adjust to an unexpected market adjustment or ‘catastrophe’. Fact is that most of those events could have been predicted with a little foresight, and reductions came as a surprise to the majority of the organization- even HR in some cases. My takeaway from those was that the business is poorly managed, and that there is no real driver at the helm. In short, that the only direction the business had was as a result of momentum.

In contrast, everything about yesterday’s event seemed strategic, well thought out and considered, and ultimately necessary. It was done because of the recession- I won’t lie there – but it was also done because of a whole host of other (undisclosable) conditions had been factored into the decision process. My takeaway here was that not only is there a driver at the helm, that driver also likes to to pull into a garage every so often, adjust the mix, check the fluids, clean the filters, refill the nitro and get a new set of fuzzy dice for the mirror. In short, someone who knows exactly what’s going on under the hood.

Having said that, if any of my former coworkers would like me to use my burgeoning network within the digital creative community to help connect them with potential opportunities, let me know- I’ve made some contacts through the Adobe User Group that may prove valuable.

HP Print Studio is an internet application that allows users to easily create professionally designed home printing projects customized with their own text and images, and it was the first project I completed at Resource Interactive, marking my transition from a lone-wolf to a team oriented developer. I won’t lie and say that the project was in any way easy- as the quote clearly demonstrates, I didn’t have the slightest clue on how the application would finally be assembled, though I really wanted to take a shot at it. It’s not that I was unfamiliar with the language; It was the fact that the application so tightly integrated visual design, interactivity and application functionality that it couldn’t be classified as either visual or functional: It was both. Without going into too much detail, it rewrote my own understanding of what a true Rich Internet Application is: An integration of experience and functionality so seamless that it becomes its own category.

The challenges within the project itself were many and varied, and on account of our client agreements I cannot go into detail on how it was assembled. Even so, I learned many valuable lessons about team environments, of which I wanted to highlight a few.

Arrogance will get you nowhere

It’s a team, leave the ego at the door. This is more difficult and profound than you might imagine, because independent contractors have to justify their existence and value to the project, and that breeds a certain type of arrogance, independence, and Not-Invented-Here I-Can-Do-It-Better attitude that is destructive to a team environment. Established habits like this are hard to break, and I’m glad that this was the first lesson I learned though I’m still not perfect in applying it.

Expertise plays an important part

From the technical leads Kris and Tommy to our Project Manager John to our fantastic CRMs Kim and Traci (and all the developers and QA people whose names I’m not sure I’m allowed to mention), everyone played a part that was absolutely critical to the project. As a cocky independent contractor it’s easy to downplay the worth of Quality Assurance, Business Analysts and similar positions because their duties sound easy and secondary to the main development effort, and I never took the time to understand exactly how valuable expertise in each of those domains is. Yes, I can do it, but not only can they do it better, they make my job much easier by doing it.

It’s safe to rely on others

When you work in an environment where human resources makes it a point to vet every candidate for job expertise first, and management is not only engaged, but invested in developing and encouraging personal growth initiatives, it is safe to assume your coworkers know what they’re doing. This is practically unheard of in the freelance space, and it caught me by surprise when I encountered it for the first time. Once I realized that I couldn’t get enough, which in retrospect probably annoyed the living daylights out of my coworkers and co-developers (until I got over the newness of it all).

Freelancers: Buyer Beware

Contractors and freelancers are incredibly expensive, and 9 times out of 10 don’t have the skills they claim to have. If there is no relationship between you other than an easily terminated contract, the value to the contractor isn’t the long-term viability of the project, but the ability to get a large project onto their resume so they can charge more next time around. This leads to fraudulent claims and resume padding, so if you are hiring someone who’s got quite a bit of freelance experience on their resume I highly recommend you verify their level of contribution first.