Alex Muller

As part of my placement at GSK, I’ve been helping look at the job applications for next year’s version of me. Here are a few things that I didn’t realise when I was applying last February, but which I’d definitely change if I had to do it all over again.

Note that I’m just me; if you’re looking for “Company Policy”, you’re most definitely in the wrong place. I’m (thankfully and obviously!) not the only person looking at these applications and I don’t have a huge amount of experience, but I’d like to think I might know what’s good in a job application for a front-end web person:

1. If you have a decent, established web presence (i.e. you have a site and search results for your name contain more than one that’s obviously about you): link to yourself all over the bloody application. That might be going a little far, but definitely use your own domain as a contact email address and link to your site if there’s an ‘additional information’ section. It puts you ahead of the competition. Bonus points if your site actually has decent content and seems well looked-after.
2. Module results don’t really matter: that doesn’t mean anybody could get 2 GCSEs and just pop right in. But first-year results aren’t as important as I was led to believe, for this specific job at least. I reckon that having loads of web-related experience is much more important than doing 10% better at university.
3. PROOFREAD & SPELLCHECK. Seriously. The number of applications that come in with things like “Glaxosmithkline” or “Glaxo smithkline” is terrifying. I’m sounding picky; but if you can’t get the name of the company you’re applying for right, why bother?

Related listening: 37signals Podcast, Episode #25: Hiring or read the transcript.

Last August, I wrote:

…this is where Twitter and Facebook fail (damn, I can’t remember who I read this from). There’s no easy way to see what I posted last Christmas, for example, on either of those services.

That’s now a lie. I installed Tweet Nest on my VPS^[1] a few weeks ago, and it’s been happily pulling in my poorly-worded thoughts since.

My Tweet Nest install is all set up, so new tweets are loaded with a PHP script and cron. You can view by month and date, and the search is rather bloody good. I’m a huge fan.

[1]: If you’re about to set up a Linode, I’ll send you my referral link.

I received this by email, from somebody trying to plan when to book a train journey:

This illustrates something that’s become really clear to me since I started work: people don’t get links. Being able to quickly dissect a link is something I (and, I suspect, most geeks) have definitely taken for granted.

The solution is pretty clear: at any point in your app, a user should be able to copy the URL and share that exact screen with anybody who should have access.

I’d change that ticket-booking link to be something link:

…combinedmatrix.aspx?command=timetable&from=kgx&to=yrk&datetime=2011-01-12-1915

David was kind enough to invite me back to St Paul’s yesterday to hear Fraser Speirs, the chap behind FlickrExport and Darkslide, talk about his rollout of an iPad to every pupil at Cedars School of Excellence near Glasgow.

Fraser spoke about the situation that led up to the iPad decision; the scarcity of MacBooks in his school, the lack of faith in the iPod touch as a complete desktop replacement. He talked about the deployment process, and how it’s completely changed the way many subjects are taught.

The example he gave that stuck with me was Art. A teacher can use Brushes on the iPad to create a drawing that illustrates a particular artistic technique. Brushes will create a ‘recording’ (a timelapse) of the creation, which can be exported and played back. And then, the magic: during a class the teacher can talk over the video and carefully explain the technique. If you’re an Art teacher and that doesn’t make you want an iPad… I’m speechless.

Then, the Q&A (I’m paraphrasing from memory – please correct me if I’ve got this wrong). George asked whether Fraser was worried that he was sending kids out into the world who couldn’t use Microsoft Office.

Fraser responded by saying that it wasn’t a worry, but it was something to think about. He went on to say that there’s no way to tell what the world of work will be like in 2023, when some of these kids will leave school.

Having worked in a huge organisation for (only!) six months so far, this worried me. I’ve experienced the brain-achingly slow rate at which IT in corporations—at least this corporation—moves. Internet Explorer 8 was released in March 2009; it’s being pushed out in June 2011, over two years later. Our Windows 7 release will start in November this year and conclude in September 2014, a full five years after the retail release. By 2015, all 100,000 employees will be running Windows 7. I’m willing to bet (and this is a total guess, I don’t work in IT or have any inside information) that even in 2023, Microsoft will be an important part of this company’s infrastructure.

Is that a good thing? Nope, not one bit. But what’s going to happen here? Will the next generation start avoiding job ads that require some kind of Microsoft Office competency? I’m really worried about the future for large companies that have such a heavy reliance on Microsoft who haven’t learnt to adapt yet. To offer, for example, new starters the OS of their choice. This talk has prompted some really interesting conversations here about the future of education and work, thank you Fraser.

Chromaroma is a London-based game involving Oyster cards; you link your card up to your account and it pulls data in from TfL’s journey history.

I wanted to be able to see more of the data that Chromaroma has stored up, so I took the stations off the leaderboard (the most visited stations) and plotted them onto TfL’s tube map. The more swipes a station’s had, the larger it appears. Oh, and coloured according to which team currently owns it.

The result?

Yep, it’s just blobs and a river. But hey, they’re pretty blobs. I’d love to see some kind of simple visualisation like this on the site.

Looking through my oldest Delicious bookmarks, I came across this animated GIF. I saved it to Delicious in March 2007, but it came from Digg one day a few years ago, some time before that. I remembered it perfectly straight away.

And I realised that this one megabyte animated image was what got me into the web for good. I reckon we’d all look at this today and think “pffft, anybody could whip up a WordPress theme to look like this in an hour”. And sure, that’s true.

But even a few years ago, this was a big deal to me. That anybody could start from something so basic and turn it into something that looked decent in such a short time was… stunning to me.

While the web can do many more fancy things today than it could when that demo was created, it feels like it all still comes back to that.

Facebook launched their Places feature in the UK around Friday morning. Spots like this one are all over my news feed already.

Lots of seemingly-different-but-actually-related thoughts coming together these last few weeks. What Gruber said at dConstruct seems to be underlying everything. Spoiler? It all comes down to taste.

Aside: Listen to the talks. All of them.

This email from university today made me think about this more. On top is the email I received, below is how I would have written it.

If you’re going to be given the ‘power’ to email several thousand students with one click, somebody should be ensuring that you have the level of taste required to do that properly. This person does not. Seriously: that’s the entirety of the email she sent. No indication of who she was, why I received it, where it came from (except the from: address). This isn’t rocket science, it’s just that some people clearly have attention to detail approaching zero in some situations.

This is something that’s coming up time and time again for me. It sounds elitist and snobby, but I can’t think of a way around it: in situations where lots of people can affect a single thing*, there needs to be a gatekeeper.

* A thing can be a project, website, brand, or any number of other things.

In this case, her email is affecting the Halifax college or university brand – and not in a good way. YUSU is an organisation who really look like they get this. Everything that I’ve seen come out of there has been beautiful. From their weekly emails, to logos, to building signage and their website. All the way down to whatever rubbish they’ll give out to new students in a few weeks (key rings, calendars, pens, etc). It all looks stunning. This is so important.

Taste, and attention to detail. I’m going to be thinking about them far more than ever before.

I’ve been going to Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps since 2007, but with the prices this year (£699 anyone?) and missing out on all the student tickets, Michael and I moseyed on down to Brighton for a day at dConstruct.

Like FOWA before it, dConstruct 2010 was my motivational and inspirational day of the year; a day that reminds me why it’s even worth switching on the computer in the morning. A whole day to get out the office (or grotty student bedroom, depending on employment status), see a great place (Brighton is really, really nice), talk to some people you don’t get to see all that often and listen to some people you might never get to hear speak again.

I wish I’d taken grown-up notes, but these were my important parts:

• Marty Neumeier: be good and different. Very different.
• James Bridle: history is more important than we could ever realise. The man printed out Wikipedia.
• Merlin Mann: being a nerd is great, because you care. As long as you know which nerd to be next: don’t get replaced by a bash script.

Disclaimer: this won’t be interesting if you’re one of those people who thinks location-based services are “oversharing”.

The decision between whether to use foursquare or Gowalla is as difficult as it’s ever been. I’m currently in the Gowalla camp, but seeing some of the beautiful visualisations from WeePlaces.com (here’s mine) has got me wavering. Because this is what it’s all about, actually being able to see the data that we’re ploughing into these services day after day. There’s been talk the last few days (summarised nicely by Jeremy) about whether it’s worth trusting all our data to different corners of the web. And it totally is, as long as we can see what it is we’re trusting them with.

This is what makes me giddy about people like BERG; they make really pretty things.

Here’s how London on my GowallaWalk map looks just now:

As people far smarter than me have noted recently, this is where Twitter and Facebook fail (damn, I can’t remember who I read this from). There’s no easy way to see what I posted last Christmas, for example, on either of those services. But I can easily see, on a shiny Google map, every place I’ve been since January. I can see the distance I travelled with my family across South Africa. The safari camps, restaurants, beaches and shops we went to. All of which evoke memories. And that’s just plain cool.