I’m at the point in my project where I need to prototype some software ideas. Doing it on the web is cheaper, simpler, and faster than prototyping a mobile app. And everything I need to do can be done on the front-end, for now. So I’m probably looking at JavaScript or Ruby on Rails, though there are other options.
I went looking to hire a programmer or a small firm to help me. I even wrote a simple spec to make the task official. But it turns out my task is not complicated enough to engage someone else.[1] And yet it’s beyond my HTML/CSS skills.
When I was young I taught myself BASIC on my Sinclair 1000, optimizing code to fit in 1K of memory. I kept those skills fresh in high school and college and even did a bit of Pascal work in grad school.
But that was a long time ago. Since then I’ve been busy learning about networks, then design, then business, then being a husband and father. Just about every year I would wonder if I should re-learn programming, if only to prototype my interaction design ideas. This often took the form of, “Should this be the year I learn Flash?” The good news is I didn’t spend a lot of time developing deep Flash expertise.
Why is 2014 any different? A few reasons:
- There’s increasing discussion about the pros and cons of unicorns
- When trying to fill an interaction design position recently I interviewed two actual unicorns. They really exist!
- I love to learn, and I feel a little tapped out of new things to learn in UX. Not that I know it all, I certainly don’t, but there’s nothing so new it stimulates my brain like it used to.
- Programming is such an exciting field these days. Stuff like Github, node.js, Rails, and non-SQL databases make it possible to make new things in new ways.
So, it’s time to learn JavaScript. More on that choice in my next post.
[1] And all the developers I talk to want to differentiate based on services. I hear from a lot of people that want to brainstorm, to partner on ideas, to think about strategy and process, and to measure ROI. For once I’d love to hear someone say, “All we want to do is write solid code at a reasonable price.” return to text