WD06 - Day 2 Musings

You know sometimes when you find it hard to make a decision between two workshops or seminars that are running at the same time? Well that happened with me for today, Day 2.

With hindsight, I probably should have chosen Derek Featherstone's Accessibility 2.0 workshop over Kelly Goto's The Iterative App. Now, this is nothing what-so-ever against the incredibly brilliant Ms. Goto, her methods or the content of her workshop, but I think it was perhaps less relevant to me than the accessibility session would have been.

Kelly gave a lot of great, useful tips and strategies to help manage large application development projects and teams, but for myself, being a one-man-band of sorts, building web apps for myself in my spare time in between building websites for local businesses, I don't feel I took as much away from the session as I would have liked. That's not to say that I didn't get anything out of it. In fact, if I scaled some of the advice back to basics, the general messages, best practices and advice was certainly useful, even for me.

I'm a perfectionist with most projects I work on. So much so that this blog almost wouldn't have existed in time for WD06, because I wanted to do it properly, with my own CMS, my own tailored design, portfolio pages, etc. Instead, I just had to bite the bullet, install WordPress (the first time I've ever used it for anthing) with a pre-made theme, make some minor customisations to the colour scheme and go live. Maybe if I used some of the advice in Kelly's lectures, I'd be able to cut back on the development time of some of my projects, while still maintaining the quality control I require.

I hope to get this website up and running all proper-like eventually, but in the meantime I'm glad I have a place of my own to waffle on about the web.