Start a project

It is important to include the developers at any stage of the project. As a developer here, you will have a chance to estimate the budget and the feasibility of the project. You can then prepare the technology with more confidence by being included at the earliest stage.

Here’s a few suggestions and tips to help you get started:

Client relationship

We have prepared a client oriented tech stack questionnaire (please find it in our team folder). In the questionnaire, we ask the client some more technical questions. Ask the project manager to send the questionnaire to the client at an appropriate time.

You’re welcomed to expand the questionnaire, however it may take the clients longer to respond. If there are many quesetions you have for them, ask the PM to schedule a call with their technical department.

After the above step, you should know more or less the following:

1. How will we deliver the product? The deployment will happen many times as you may need to deliver fixes or updates based on their new business decisions. It would be more tricky if they want to host on themselves.
2. Sometimes they cannot give you any access to their infrastructure, only asking you to deliver ZIP files to them via email & Wetransfer. How can you make the process at least easier for you and the contact person?
3. How will the clients conduct QA and report bugs with us? Are they familiar with any specific tool? For smaller projects, will it be okay with writing down their observations in a simple spreadsheet?

If the clients give you too less information and you find it not possible to work with confidently. Let the PM know and arrange a meeting for you. Clients usually understand and will be quite open if you explain your concern to them, it is also their interest to work on an awesome project smoothly with you!

Internal Organisation

Here’re a few principles good to have in mind:

1. Other developers will highly likely need to work with the projects you started eventually. It is important to bear in mind that the source code should be reachable, updated, and easy to work with for others.
2. Some business decisions will change eventually. Please be careful and avoid constructing a system that will corner you at a later stage. If the changes happening to fast or changed into something you find it not possible to meet the original deadline, please notify PM and feel free to find out a solution together with others.

It is a challenging job to maintain a quality codebase while handling the clients, changing specifications, various browsers and devices. We have created a few internal tools to help you on this. You are most welcome to contribute and give your critique!

We have prepared a boilerplate for a common content website. It should suffice most of our clients’ needs, and quite flexible to expand. For the detail technical specification, please check the README file in the repository.

In terms of working with design. We have established a comprehensive guideline in 2018, which use a universal 1/20 grid, 8-based spacing system. From developers’ perspective, it reduces the unneccessary complexity that might occur in the design, therefore enable developers to implement and iterate the design faster. We have developed various tool to communicate/develop in this style. Please refer to our team folder, and/or ask your fellow developers and designers for more information about it.

Summary

Never hesitate to discuss your concerns and questions with the clients. You can do it through the PM and if circumstances allow, directly talk to their tech team.

When starting a project, you are free to use the boilerplate, and you are free to explore what is the best setup for you. Just bear in mind that people will quite likely participate at any stage of the project.

You will always be able to find resources in our team folder. When you are unsure, simply ping someone relevant, or ask in the #ask channel to everyone. Any work you did will become a valuable experience for everyone.

That’s it! You are prepared and good to go!