Macadamian Blog

How to Work with Someone 12 Hours Away

The Macadamian office spans two continents, four countries and four time zones. In fact, two of our offices are 12 hours apart. Our teams are made up of people from different offices so as a developer in Ottawa, my day-to-day activities usually involve work with colleagues in Romania, Armenia, and California.

Making long-distance teams work as well as local teams isn't easy to do (at all!) but it's crucial here at Macadamian, so we've built up a number of processes and tools that help make this possible. Here are my top four tips:

Even Genius Strikes Out. Why Even the Best Designers need User Research.

Clients often ask me "can't you design something great and innovative without user feedback?" The short answer is "we might be able to, but there may be some high risk involved". Occasionally they'll push back, implying that this is the fault of my designer’s skill level. This brings to mind a cautionary tale from another field about relying on genius alone to deliver "the answer".

Detecting Mobile Browser Properties with CSS3 Media Queries

Targeting a specific mobile device in a web application – that is , writing code inside a web application to optimize the experience for specific devices – can be relatively straightforward or very difficult, depending on how you approach it. The trouble is, it’s often misunderstood, especially if you come from a desktop-web development background. Like much of software development, it all comes down to context. The issues web developers face on the desktop are in a different context than those faced on mobile platforms.

How Designers and Developers can Work Together

One thing that we're proud of here at Macadamian is that our design and development teams work very closely with one another. Like I said in my previous post, it helps us make better products more quickly, and have more fun while doing it. But something that I didn't cover then was how we make this relationship work. Having worked with many of our designers on a variety of projects, here my advice:

Long-term Platform Strategy Cuts Costs of Application Development

While products that get to market quickly may initially be a success with users, if they were not built with a sound long-term strategy, they can easily end up costing orders of magnitude more for your organization to maintain in the long run.