Meet Rob Holmes, one of our web developers.
Which three words describe you best?
Logical, Efficient, Automagical
You’ve just been on an iPhone app development course; ready to get stuck into app development?
I really enjoyed the iPhone course run by ICT Wales, the lecturers Chris Price and Neil Taylor were great. It’s always extremely helpful when learning a new language (Objective C) to have someone on hand to explain the nuances. The upshot is that… yes I am all set for iPhone app development, bring it on… I’ve already got some prototypes set up for pulling data from Drupal views, saving it to an SQLite database and using it to populate a UITableView… [In plain English, that's the ability to pull material from a content management system straight into an app!]
As a James Good Limited web developer you work collaboratively with designers on website projects. Is that easy or are there sometimes disagreements?
The designers have a good concept of what is and what isn’t possible on the web, and we have a good appreciation for design. The only time problems occur is when the development team has to reject a design feature due to the need to support old browsers. Even then it’s hardly a disagreement, more a debate on how best to gracefully degrade a feature to make it work in all browsers.
If James Good didn’t employ both design and development professionals, how would the design / development relationship work remotely?
If we didn’t have designers on hand, it would be incredibly difficult to produce work of the same quality: with all the best will in the world, not everything is communicated or catered for in a design file and clarification and discussion of functionality is an essential part of any project. It is great to have the designers on site to quickly knock-up a new button or specify element styles that didn’t exist in the original design. Being able to do this at the moment you need allows for an uninterrupted workflow that could not be achieved if our designers were remote and not on hand throughout the day.
You’re always coming to work with new ideas and things to show us. How do you keep up to date with the latest web technologies?
Keeping up with the latest web technologies is generally an easy task. Much of what I discover is stumbled upon whilst working on a solution to a particular problem. The rest of my news gathering is effectively outsourced to a few select people on Twitter. At the moment, a developer called Paul Irish seems to be at the cutting edge in the fields I’m interested in and is doing a great job of keeping me up to date in the world of the web via his Twitter feed. Thanks Mr Irish.
You worked independently for a long time, what’s the best bit of being a James Good team member?
I found working for myself and working from home, while having many great benefits, meant that leaving the house became somewhat of a rarity! Since starting at James Good, it’s been great to work as part of a team where you can bounce ideas off one another and work in a lively office environment.
What’s your biggest James Good achievement to date?
This has got to be the transition from Wordpress to Drupal as my go-to content management system. The flexibility Drupal offers is incredible and while it has taken some time to master (if mastering is even possible) it’s definitely been a worthwhile and satisfying achievement.