No pictures? I get 50% of the information of a recipe based on the picture of the final dish. I don't buy recipe books if they don't have pictures of the final dish of each recipe
playcocola.com an online platform to help videogame developers receive valuable feedback on their projects. Collect and organize gameplay video recordings of testers' sessions, with text comments and thinking aloud. I'm building both the backend in Rails and the recording client in HTML/JS.
As in any situation in life there is not a straight answer. There are pros and there cons in your situation.
I understand you are struggling because you are doing many things you are not confident with, this is a stressful and unpleasant sensation. We want to feel challenged in our responsibilities but also we what to be sure we can do i then.
I can understand that having someone senior to guide you and, why not say, to protect you, can bring you this security you need to feel comfortable with what you are doing. And to be sure you are learning things in the right way
On the other hand, in my opinion, in your actual situation you are going to develop an alert8ng mode in your brain. You are going to collect a giant amount of problems that are going to stick in your mind. They will be itching you strongly and when you finally will find the solution, either by your own or, in future situations, with someone senior you will collaborate with, you will be extremely attentive and the knowledge will be writing in your brain like in a rock.
Having someone to guide you will teach you how this person solves this problem, you will think this is the way and will give you small space to develop your own way to do it or at least to understand that there are always other ways.
The most important skill in our profession, i think, it is not too know the solutions to everything, but to develop a powerful problem solving skill
What I would do, and I did, would be to stay on this company for 1~2 years and then move to another team with senior people to mentor you. You will be in a privileged situation to really learn from this people.
- The impassable bottleneck will be in the database
- Don't make any decision that you can delay. Very often you will see the initial requirements have changed, or not relevant any more.
- Listen to your team colleges, replay to them what they just said, even if you don't agree make them sure you have listened and understood what their proposition is. If you don't agree say something like "I maybe wrong but I am going to go this other way". Most of the discussions will end, no with an agreement but when the other person feels that they have been listened.
- Use "boring" technology when your objective is to build solid things.
In our organization we have been dealing with the lack of documentation (or chaos on it, what it essentially the same) for long time already.
At the beginning I was the first one in opposing in making too much investment in documentation, mostly because the amount of resources needed to keep documentation updated was overpassing our capabilities. And I consider that an out-of-date documentation is worst that not having documentation at all.
But we are growing, new people is joining us every month (week) and they feel completely lost, and the same questions are arriving again and again, and there is not any central person to ask all of them.
We decided we have to invest in documentation.
And, I, as the technical responsible, started taking this very seriously. I staid full days creating pages and pages of documentation about our systems and how to operate with them. I was using Google Docs just because it was easy to use at least to create the first version of it, then, when the structure of the documentation was emerged, I would think what would be the most appropriate system to allocate it for the long term.
Working on this was not very rewarding. I found my self writing detailed information about things that maybe none was gonna read ever. It was a very solitary work because even if any one could contribute to it it is difficult to distribute the work, specially at the beginning when the structure was still not defined. The velocity that our system was changing and growing was faster than my velocity in writing documentation, making it impossible to feel that I was doing any progress.
And above all, for me (and most of my colleges), writing documentation was a very boring task.
Then we changed completely.
How can we make the documentation generation an engaging activity?. How can be sure that we are writing the documentation that is needed and no more?. How can we involve everybody in the creation of our knowledge database?. How can we make sure the information is accessible?
Then we think in the Question/Answer systems.
Where do I go to find solutions to my problems when I am stuck in a programming issue? In what place I have collaborated the most in sharing knowledge with others? What place makes me feel good spending time sharing knowledge?
I am talking about StackOverflow.
We thought we need something like this to our documentation problem.
There are many things that makes this an obvious decision:
- Documentation is created "on demand": some has a question and someone else answer it. So the documenter knows that she is helping someone, a concrete person. Making it feel helpful with the immediate reward of the recognition.
- Everybody can create documentation: These systems doesn't require any technical skill, they have nice interfaces, they are build to remove any friction in the generation of content: styling, uploading images.
- Not structure: You don't need to think where to put this piece of information. You don't need to follow an index. Maybe a bit doubts with the category or the tags, but it is minimum
- Information is accessible: these systems have a very nice search engine that allow us to not only show you results of your search but also pointing you when you are asking something that has been already answered.
- Information is sharp and to the point: I have a question I want a concrete answer, I don't want to read a full theory article about generic information.
- It is funny: some inner gammification mechanisms make us feel good when we interact with the systems.
We were looking for different systems and even I love [StackExchange](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16054/is-stack-exch...) we decided finally for its younger brother [Discourse](https://www.discourse.org/). Mostly because it is open source and we have the possibility to keep my so extremely costly generated content in our house and not been hook to any company. At the beginning we are using the hosted version for convenience though.
We are in the beginning of this process (3 months), for now everybody loves it. We are trying to build the habit that every time someone asks something (by email, slack, ...) we ask to create a question in our Discourse and we answer it there.
This is a very good advise. And it totally will payoff. I know how the hard work can generate income. I also know how time demanding and life consuming this is.
I am wondering now if I can find ways where the money can generate money and therefore I can enjoy of more "free" time.
I feel very reflected in this "slow code" interpretation. Instinctively, I try to refrain my self to implement this new feature that looks important but not urgent. The positive outcome is not only that you have more time to think about the proper approach but also eventually, some times, the feature shows it self not needed any more.
Does the idea of working with opinion research data from millions of representative samples from around the world intrigue you?
Backed by some of Europe’s leading venture capital firms, Dalia has generated over a billion answers from people spread across 96 countries with the resulting data cited in over 2.000 news articles globally.
We are always happy to have new people in our engineering team. Our architecture is mostly Ruby, but we are also using other technologies where they look more appropriate.
Plus: we are located in one of the most exciting European cities :)
Here is the full position description and the application form: