Project Management Tips from the Developer’s Point of View

Today’s post is on something a bit different but still very much relevant in the web development world: project management. Now, I’m not all that old and I haven’t been a web developer for all that long (about 6 years in total, 3 actually getting paid ;-) but I have had the opportunity of working for a medium-sized media company with a development team of about 25 developers, a small 5-6 person development company (3 developers), and as an independent contractor.

When I began my career at the medium sized company, I initially saw my project managers as a pain in the ass. All I was interested in doing was coding. I had my own ideas of how the project or feature was going to be done and I thought that I could handle deadlines and project requirements better than they could. Was it really necessary to ask me multiple times a day what I was doing and what percentage of the project was still left to be done? PM’s gave new meaning to the phrase “avoid like the plague.” In all honesty, I wondered why in the hell these people were even hired to begin with. I just could not see the role of a project manager as being all that important.

Read More »

Posted in: Articles, Development, How To

Adventures of a Summer Intern: Volume I

Bob asked me to make weekly blog posts outlining what I learn as an intern here at at Synapse Studios, therefore, I will commence my weekly installments. Hopefully these posts will be slightly interesting to those who wish to read and the cliché title is not too much of a deterrent.

Some of the main reasons I wanted to work here was to learn more about enterprise level web development and to learn how to work in a team. The first week has been very educational. I have been exposed to a myriad of new software and ideas. As an intern I am stowed away in the corner of the office and given slightly more mundane tasks than the rest of the group, but even these assignments have proven to be valuable to me.

Read More »

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Development

Meet David Bernal: Developer

My name is David Bernal and I’m one of the developers at Synapse Studios. I’ve been with the company for nearly 2 years, which, at this company is fairly long. I’ve been chest-deep in code since day one and have worked for various clients and on many personal projects before then.

As a developer, my primary contributions to this blog will be about enterprise patterns and reuse ability as we implement them in client projects and particularly in the Canopy Framework. One of my particular strengths is the wide variety of experience I have beyond the realm of PHP-based web development. In a previous life as a desktop application developer I worked primarily with C# and so I have experience with the things the .NET library does well and those which PHP does better. Based on this experience, I’ll be working with the team this summer to incorporate some exciting automation and reusability enhancements into the framework. Stay tuned, as the coming months promise to be exciting times for the web’s next best application platform. [That's Canopy, we think]

Posted in: People