The days of locking developers in the backroom so they can program away are long gone.  Today’s developers are invited to interact directly with marketers, sales personnel, editors, customer service reps, and even other people outside the company such as end-customers, the general public, partners, etc.. through physical interaction and using new forms of communication such as blogs, Twitter, forums, and other social networking tools.  By interacting with others, especially those that are more involved with the business side of things, allows a developer to build on his or her business analytic skills.  These skills can then be utilized to develop websites and ideas that are more intuitive, more useful, and caters to the overall goals and vision of the requester and not the developer.

I would like to challenge developers out there to try and be more involved with others outside their departments.  I am confident to say that not only will it make your work as a developer easier by making your focus and goals clearer, but ultimately allows you to develop projects with a better mindset of what kind of updates and add-ons that will come by in the near and far future.  This makes changes more manageable and less time consuming.  As a fellow developer, I know there’s nothing worse than developing a project perfectly right down to the nitty-gritty details as specify on the “specs”, only to find out months later that the next phase involves you to rewrite a large portion of the project because the original version wasn’t coded to be scalable with the criteria of the next phase.  So the extra commitment and effort you put out upfront by interacting with others makes up in the long run by saving time in the future with revisions and upgrades.  In addition, because you’re focus and goals are clearer during development, you essentially turn around with a better overall product that everyone is satisfied with that will make more of an impact to the overall business.

Another thing I would like to challenge other developers to do is to participate in online social communities such as Twitter, blogs, and forums.  I have gotten a lot of ideas, feedback, and solutions to issues I’ve encountered by bouncing them off other people.  Recently, I’ve started using Twitter (Search Twitter for SarnP) to micro-blog statuses on some of the projects I’ve been working on.  I didn’t think much of it at first as it was just an experiment to become more familiar with the technology.  However, I found myself encouraged by the responses from others who followed my tweets.  By Twittering my day-to-day statuses, it allow others to see what I’m currently working on (useful for internal communication) and engages them as well as others to leave feedback in a non-threatening manner;  some in which I take into consideration while working on the project.  Also, since I’m on the front line in terms as web projects goes; customers, advertisement partners, and loyal web visitors that follow my tweets have a front row seat to hear the latest site releases, updates, and enhancement way before anybody else!  This is a great way to start a buzz for a new website.

Tyndale does a great job of pulling developers like myself out of the back office and places me directly in the business environment where I can interact with other departments face-to-face.  As I sit at my desk, I am flanked by public relation colleagues while the sales department team is only a few cubes over to which I can easily setup brainstorming session on how to create a website that caters to their customers (bookstore owners) and improving Tyndale’s bottom-line.  Or in the frequent case, a an employee would come by my desk to point out how they would like a website to work right at my screen allowing me to clearly define a solution and produce a quick turn around.   Another developer and I are frequently encouraged by our peers to collaborate with others in different departments so that we can better understand the vision of Tyndale’s ministry, the business, and the scope of a project at hand.  The combination of using social networking sites, independent research, and the face-to-face interactions with other employees allow us to be the experts that can offer exceptional ideas that exceeds expectation and satisfy marketing needs with the technical and business know-how’s to get it done.

So what are you waiting for?  Get out of the backroom already!