Development

The process of designing and developing website and applications is changing. Tools and skillsets are always pushing forward, and the old way of doing things doesn’t cut it anymore. The traditional methodology has many names. Some call it the waterfall, implying the project is like water, flowing down through each department until completion. This is kind of naive, and obviously doesn’t allow anyone to go back upstream for any reason, ever. Others call it an assembly line, in which each department is handed something, does something to it and passes it on to the next department. This would be fine if we were assembling toys...
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The phrase “responsive design” has been getting a lot of attention lately. Conferences are organizing whole sessions around it, Google has come out in support of it (when it makes sense for users) and everyone is scurrying to make sure their website now fits the latest buzzword. But while responsive design may be new to some people, the concepts and technologies involved have been around for years. It also doesn’t help that, most people think responsive design just means that your website resizes itself depending on the width of your browser window, or the size of your handheld device. If that’s your understood definition, you’re...
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As an agency, we believe in process. The goal is to streamline. The goal is to remove ambiguity. The goal is to become more efficient, but, most importantly, the goal is to foster a more collaborative workflow between the different departments. And that’s why I spent the majority of last week looking at our process for developing websites and web applications and, alongside our other departments, made some significant modifications to our workflow. There’s a problem in a majority of high-volume production agencies. We partition our designers, our developers, our content creators… and they only come together when 1) it’s time to ‘hand off’ a...
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As the lead developer at Overit, I’m consulted on a daily basis for my ‘expertise’ by clients, by account managers, by business owners, by colleagues and by my own team to create solutions for problems I’ve never thought about before. I’m expected to be on the top of my game and ready with the right answers to problems, even when I have little to no background knowledge of the particular situation. I’m asked for my opinion, my advice and my solutions. When that’s not happening, I’m writing code. I’m calculating every permutation of an application’s logic. I’m anticipating a user’s interaction with unknown data. With...
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You need a new Website. Or a Web application. Or you have an amazing idea you need someone to actually build. Chances are you’re going to need a developer. There are a lot of stereotypes about developers. Many think we’re nocturnal (some of us are) or we speak in some sort of code. Or that if you come into our offices here at Overit you’ll find us wearing headphones and typing furiously with deep thoughtful frowns on our faces. The truth, developers are a pretty awesome bunch! We can be friendly, we like to talk, and we especially love to solve problems. Even more than...
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