Recently I was involved in an very short bit of consultancy for an e-commerce company. We were focussing on the performance of their site in the browser, and they were more than a little surprised at the software engineering rigour that we exhibited given that we are just an agency. Perhaps we’re thought of us web development production lines who churn out web sites. That’s not my view.
It seems to me that this is the time for some responsibility. In the face of the kind of civil unrest that we have witnessed in the UK over the last few days, starting in north London and spreading to many other areas across the city and then to other cities we must have a return to responsible behaviour. I’m not just talking about the people turning to criminal acts, young and old, men and women, but also about, specifically about, the media.
One of the nice things about being a web developer today, is that thanks to the incredibly low cost of resilient, scalable hosting infrastructure, and the abundance of free tools and technologies, you are empowered to create things and release them to the a huge audience. You can experiment with much less risk than ever before. We are seeing evidence of this with so many entrepreneurs and startups entering the market. Some more successfully than others.
No really! Read that title again. I’m about to argue against placing so much blame for painful Web development at the door of Internet Explorer 6. I’m not going try and claim that IE6 isn’t a huge pain in the arse of all good Web developers. Let’s face it, Web developers love to bitch about it, but I do think that it’s time for some accountability.
It seems that the Twitterverse is all of a flutter following recent blog posts from Phillie Casablanca and Paul Downey. I’m watching this with keen interest and it has been the subject of much impassioned discussion in our office.