Tell me about how you got to where you are now. I was born in Kajang, Selangor. My father was a lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). His career required him to be at different places for a length of time, and we moved a lot because of this.

Growing up, I lived around Malaysia in places such as Johor and Sabah, while also spending my youth at Leeds, in the United Kingdom. When I returned to Malaysia, I entered a local high school and also briefly attended Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP).

I found myself working as a programmer over the next few years. Initially I started out as a PHP developer but found myself liking front-end work over time. It was then I decided to just go with both front-end and back-end development under belt.

What do you think got you nominated as “Developer Hero” in the Rice Bowl Awards 2016? During my days as a programmer, I stumbled upon JomWeb; a community of like-minded developers located in Malaysia. Like any developer group, people were asking questions on how they could achieve certain things in regards to programming. I started out as a regular developer in the group but did my best to answer and help them as much as I could.

This pattern led me to create open-source libraries for both PHP and Laravel which helped out the others who needed a solution to their problems. CastMyCode, a pet project of mine was built for teaching others. When I teach others on coding, some of them have errors in their code because they’d have to type out the code by hand. What CastMyCode does is share the learning files on the server so that it is usable on the web. Those who I am teaching at that moment can just access it right away. Most people in my programming classes are beginners, so this helps them out a lot.

I believe that if you are good at something, you should contribute back to the community wherever possible. If you spend the time teaching others, it won’t lessen your knowledge or waste your time. Instead, it will help you more because if you are able to teach something, it means that you have a good grasp of that knowledge. I probably inherited the love of teaching from my father, who I have mentioned, was a lecturer. From there on, I was being blogged about and featured in a number of online articles. The recognition probably came from there. Me being awarded the title of “Developer Hero” also helps me validate myself and my efforts.

How do you find time with your family as a busy developer?This is made possible thanks to my wife who has been supportive of my career. In a word, she is a ‘superwoman’, being able to take care of the kids while progressing her own career as a teacher. My wife has been with me long before we got married so she understands my situation. At home, the kids are being taken care by her. Every work day, I spend around 1-2 hours with my family during dinner. Out of the work days, I spend even more time with the family.

I believe that some people are too focused on their work. I do my best to get home by 6 PM, so I can spend those precious hours with my family. Even if there is a crunch time, I would be at home coding anyway. This way I will know if anything happens because they can always reach out to me since I’m physically there.

What are your thoughts on AngularJS for those who are starting out in it? To those who are learning AngularJS for the first time, they would need more training to understand the framework. My advice would be to read up as much as possible on it and also get a mentor who can guide you what you need to cover and learn.It is best to go to someone who actually does it. Also, Angular’s GitHub is a source of information that is great for reference.

When I was teaching the Stampede developers on AngularJS, I taught them Angular 1 instead of Angular 2. The reason for this is because, if you are a normal front-end developer, and suddenly make a jump to Angular 2, you will have a hard time. This is because Angular 2 is written in typescript, an enhanced version of JavaScript. You will need to get familiar with developer tools such as Gulp which takes in typescript and converts it into JavaScript so that websites can read it. Definitely not a straightforward process and a lot of preparation is needed beforehand. Also Angular 2 is currently still in beta, which means that a lot of Angular 1’s libraries have not been fully ported over to Angular 2. It will likely take around 1 to 2 years for the ecosystem surrounding Angular 2 to mature.

…to be truly good at something, you need to spend 20% of your time learning and 80% of the time doing it.

Do you have any advice for those who are interested in coding? If you are starting out fresh, you will definitely hit many brick walls – don’t be discouraged by it. If you have any questions on how to do things, reach out to the developer community. You will find plenty of folks who are willing to guide you. However, your best bet is to find a mentor who can set a learning path for you so that you don’t go astray.

My best piece of advice is, to be truly good at something, you need to spend 20% of your time learning and 80% of the time doing it. Coding is a skill, and like other skills, the more you do it, the better you will become.

The post Being a Developer Hero: An Interview with Zulfa Juniadi appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Let me reiterate this: there is never a typical day in the life of a Project Manager. The following is intended as a guide of my day-to-day role in Stampede. There are days Stage B takes up most of the time, or even the whole day. There are days Stage C takes up as equal portion as Stage B – nevertheless, every day is an adventure by itself.

Stage A: Come As You Are

Approximation of the Percentage of Day Taken: 20%

This time of the day is often spent writing, replying emails and entertaining clients on Skype. Some never fail to give me endearing nicknames of all sorts. I have been called gangsta, superstar, Slide Deck and most recently, Diggy. In between our playful banter, we follow up and catch up on recent projects.

I spend this portion of the day as well going through everyone’s daily planner of which we have set up for each of us with Trello, an awesome discovery of Shen’s.

This first stage of the day may seem menial for some, but it is important to set the momentum going and to prepare for the next stage of the day.

Stage B: Rolling In The Deep

Approximation of the Percentage of Day Taken: 50%

Behold – the most important, substantial part of the day.

Taking up most of my daily tasks, this is the portion mostly reserved for internal reviews and meetings of every minuscule and gargantuan proportion equally. It is the most crucial because it requires my and the team’s undivided focus and attention to go every tiny detail as well as filtering (the latter mostly applied to meetings) to avoid being overwhelmed.

Some may say it is the hair-tearing portion of the day, but I beg to differ. With an amazing team and a set of wonderful clients, oftentimes we survive throughout the whole ordeal adventure.

Oftentimes. I have always wanted to use this word.

Stage C: Feelin’ So Good

Approximation of the Percentage of Day Taken: 30%

This is my favourite part of my work day. After the bugs are fixed, the negotiation with client about sneaking in responsive design in the middle of development goes well without a bloodbath, the cross-browser functionality dragons (they are mostly IE) are slayed – I would retreat to a couple of my online resources for some research and reading on the topic about web development and project management. These are amongst my favourites, in no particular order:

1. Smashing Magazine
2. Web Designer Depot
3. A List Apart
4. Signals vs Noise
5. Cognition
6. PM Hut

Staying true with the culture at Stampede where everyone is encouraged to share, I also post a couple of them on company Twitter, whilst some of them get sent to the inbox of the team members for their weekend reading. The writing blog task often gets done in this portion of the day as well.

The Encapsulation of It All

Being a Project Manager, our output may not be translated as tangible as the ones for designers, developers and programmers. People may not notice the non-existent haggling skills we developed to discuss about a scope creep. We act as the sponge – insulating the team from all the pressure from above ourselves as much as we can so the team can focus on the work.

Needless to say, the presence of a role – take note that I said presence of a role instead of presence of an absolute being – of a Project Manager is necessary to keep the team together. We are the planners, the mediators, the interpreters, the cheerleaders, the company jesters (hang on, that is probably just me) – and so much more.

Questions?

The post A Day In The Life of a Project Manager appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

I must admit, keyboard is still the only input device where I can always feel the satisfaction of conveying what I want to say onto the computer screen. No, I’m not talking about touchscreen keyboard on your smartphone but a real tactile, button-ful keyboard.

Nothing beats a generic keyboard. Just ask yourself this, when was the last time you type flawlessly on a touchscreen keyboard? Autocomplete or swiftkey is a supplementary to its flaw, not a complementary.

In my line of work as a programmer that deals with the text editor, the keyboard plays a major role in churning out thousands and thousands of lines of code. So having a good keyboard is vital to my performance and a great keyboard can saves me a lot of time.

Why time? That’s because typo. Typos are irritating. You may say that fixing a typo only takes a few seconds, but did you know that on average we spent hours per year fixing our own typo? Not to mention that typo kills the train of thoughts too.

The reason why I used the word ‘satisfaction’ previously to describe my typing experience is because typing can become an ecstasy when you are typing long sentences or paragraphs in one go with your train of thoughts are not being blocked or annoyed by typos. The click-clack sound the keyboard makes can become white noise for diving into your subconscious.

My preciousss

The keyboard that I am using currently is a mechanical keyboard and I recommend that you get one if typing is your business. Note that commercial keyboards all come with dome-switch while mechanical keyboards come with mechanical switch. I won’t go into the technical details but here is a short summary of why you should get a mechanical keyboard:

Actuation

Actuation is the amount of force that you have to exert on the button for a key to register as typed. The problem with commercial keyboard is that each different buttons have different actuation. Imagine putting different strain on your fingers after a long day of typing. That will be very tiring. Now for mechanical keyboard, the switches are consistent across the board. After using mechanical for awhile, you will be  able to feel the difference with dome-switch keyboard requiring more stress trust me.

Faith & Durability

Do you trust your keyboard? I am assuming that you readers out there type by looking at the screen instead of the keyboard. So, when you press that long ‘Shift’ key, the spacebar, backspace, or even the ‘Enter’ key do you trust it to register? If your keys sometime got stuck halfway when you’re hitting it, that means it’s time to change the keyboard. Dome-switch has an expected lifespan of 5-10 million hits while mechanical switches have a life expectancy of 50 million hits. We’re talking per key here. So if you are doing frequent typing on a commercial keyboards, you need to change one after one or two years. Investing in a mechanical keyboard isn’t that bad now isn’t it?

Key Rollover (NKRO)

This advantage is more to gamers. With key rollover feature, you will be able to press just about as many keys as you want on your keyboard and they will all register as once as compared to commercial keyboards where they only allow two to three keys at a time.

Sound

This could be a disadvantage for some people but for me, the sound that mechanical keys make is zen. It makes typing much more fun and it helps with the faith point that I mentioned – my ears act as a way to tell if a key has been typed or not. Also it’s one of the reason why purist typists are still using those ancient typewriter with a ding!

However, the sound might be annoying for people near you, but fret not as there are a lot of different mechanical switches out there, some are more quiet. So choose your flavour wisely. Note that you can even mod some dampeners to reduce the sound but I’ll leave that for you to discover yourself.

So that’s about wrap it up, tell me, are you considering a mechanical keyboard now? If you are already hooked onto one, how is your experience so far? I’d love to know. 🙂

(Top photo credit: Zen Garden)

The post Click-clack-ding! appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.