Our mission at WebCakes is to surprise and delight. As such it’s my goal to keep up-to-date on the latest development practices, styles, and trends relative to our business. To do that, James and I are always learning new skills and improving old ones.
When I worked for my previous employers, it wasn’t a requirement to do so. If you’re hired as a front-end integrator, then some HTML/CSS will suffice. Back-end developer? Great, a moderate knowledge of Drupal theming is all it takes. If something breaks, google the fix. Rinse, repeat for 8 hours, and commute home. Not once is the infrastructure questioned. Not once do we think, if we did [insert anything here], maybe that would improve the quality and efficiency of our product. I always strived to new skills, and did so, but was unwilling to apply them. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
When we started WebCakes, I was still a little unprepared for setting up an infrastructure, a process of delivering sweet, sugary webness to our clients. Not because I hadn’t learned what I had to, but because I was afraid of change. I knew that SASS/LESS was a great alternative to standard CSS, that building off Bootstrap was an optimal way of creating responsive solutions, and that WordPress made more sense than Drupal for most client use-cases. Eventually, with a little guidance from James, I learned to embrace these changes and incorporate them into our infrastructure.
The moral of the story is that it’s not just enough to learn a new skill or software. If you know that it’ll increase your efficiency, make the change! Update your process, and enjoy a world of benefit for you, your services, and your clients.