Blog of Max Olander

As a part of the technology specialization at Hyper Island we were supposed to perform some industry research. I, Kasper Kuijpers and Rikard Ekberg got the chance to ask Rick Webb, co-founder and COO at The Barbarian Group, some questions about the role of a developer and how things are done at Barbarian. He responded with some really nice answers, so I decided to post some of them here. Enjoy!

“When we started, we only hired great flash developers who were also brilliant creatives, because everything we did was highly integrated flash sites. Then they invented AJAX.”

What trends and technologies do you think a developer should know off?

A developer these days needs to be pretty aware of everything that’s going on, as well as specialized in something. I look for developers who know as many of the following as possible, usually with some specialty in one of them: CSS/AJAX/Markup languages, XML, PHP, Flash, Ruby on Rails, SQL and .NET. All of our developers know one of these areas well – generally we have Markup Devs, Ruby Devs, .NET devs and PHP devs and everyone knows XML.

Beyond that, I think people need to keep up on what’s up next, like Drupal and Merb, though that’s more of a mindset – always be looking. A good example is Cocoa, where myself and our CTO have encouraged our Devs to spend time learning, and now we are very well positioned as Apple released an Cocoa-based iPhone SDK.

How do you keep up with trends regarding technology, and how do you deploy them in projects?

Keeping up with trends is really in your blood. If it feels like work to you, you’re probably in the wrong line of work. Personally I read blogs and the news, talk to friends, participate in message boards and forums, and read our internal ideas, developers and devices mailing lists. I confess that personally it’s been getting more difficult as managing a larger company enters my life, but i believe if you’re the sort of person who is passionate about this sort of thing, you find the time. My partner Keith, for example, has been diving into Arduino in his spare time – as if he doesn’t have enough to do.

We TRY at the Barbarian Group to give people 20% or so of their free time to delve into research, and on paper, at least, we make an effort to take those experimental projects and turn them into reality. On paper it sounds good, but in reality it’s been harder going, as we’ve also been financing company growth and three offices with that same extra free time and money. As our growth ends, though, this year, I expect we’ll be able to turn our attention to more experiments. In the meantime, we’ve made a point to only hire passionate, engaged people, so they’ve done a TON of research on their own.

This leads to the biggest challenge of this question, which is how do you deploy these new technologies in projects. Sometimes, of course, this is easy – Actionscript 3 is a great example. Eventually the plug in penetration was high enough that our clients were cool with us developing in it, so off we went. No difficulty there. Ruby on Rails was also pretty easy – it offered substantial cost savings and dev time savings to our clients – so when confronted with two prices, they are happy to choose the less expensive!

Other technologies – Processing and Arduino in particular – are a tougher sell. We actually took a stake in a gallery in Seattle called the McLeod Residence – www.mcleodresidence.com – to do artistic installations showcasing some of these technologies, so we could build case studies. Non-profit work is another avenue – our work for the Webby Awards, for example, was a great showcase of our skills in integrating social trends into a brand environment.

What are the expectations on a developer?

Passion for what they do, an attention to detail, a commitment to process, a hunger to learn and a polite demeanor. We try to avoid the developers who exhibit the typical disgruntled demeanor, and look for people who are helpful and understanding of the client’s needs and concerns.

What role does a developer play in your organizations creative processes?

Everyone in the company is a creative. Everyone. We have developers who are frequently the creative leads on projects – Kenji Ross and Andrew Bell in particular, though others have often done it. The creative lead on any project can come from anywhere in the company, and it’s just as likely to be a developer. Additionally, all developers, as I mentioned, participate in the ideation and brainstorming for every project.

How does the cooperation between a developer and designer look like?

This is an ongoing process here. It’s changed a TON since we started. When we started, we only hired great flash developers who were also brilliant creatives, because everything we did was highly integrated flash sites. Then they invented AJAX. Ha. Now we have non-technical art directors and designers, non-visual developers, etc. The process is ongoing, but we’ve gotten a really good since of collaboration between the designers and developers. We’ve definitely been spending a lot of time investigating Scrum methodologies and Agile Development and how that integrates not just with visual design but with user experience design as well. We have a ways to go before we perfect the process, but I can say everyone’s on board, and the collaboration has been great. Basically, the creative lead and the technical lead are assigned so that there are some complimentary skill sets, and they sort of set the working relationship at the outset that the project will follow. It varies from project to project, of course, but provided everyone’s intelligent and knows their field, it works pretty well. The CTO and Creative Directors keep an eye on things, as does the producer, so there’s a bit of oversight, but generally it’s pretty hands off.