It's never what you do, it's how you do it

After about 2 years of experience with web development and customer relations I think I've finally understood how to deal with people who don't really know what they want. The bad thing is they often believe they do know what they want. But they don't.

Many people come to me and ask me to implement a specific solution. I'm cool with that (at least I used to be) and everything goes smoothly until the customer receives beta version of the application. Suddenly they realize that their idea of a solution doesn't really fit well into the real world problems. So what they do is ask to make some "small" changes in the logic of the application. The problem is that those "small" changes end up being huge, costly and time consuming. If you've ever been responsible for customer relations I bet you know what I'm talking about.

Conclusions? The first questions to ask are: what is the problem we're trying to solve? Why do we need to solve it? Maybe this problem is just a result of a different problem, which should be fixed first? Why do we choose this solution?

Good understanding of the problem is the key to quick and effective solution. The more questions you ask the more time it will save you later on. It is extremely important to listen to the customer and know exactly what he/she needs. Usually you'll be the person who needs to decide what to do, not your customer, especially when you're dealing with non-tech people. Your customers will have some kind of internal feelings about available solution schemes, but they will have a hard time expressing themselves. Ask a lot of simple questions, try to explain potential consequences of their choice, MAKE NOTES. Try to choose 2 up to 4 key qualities your customer pays most attention to. If the key point of application is ease of use don't put in a lot of unnecessary functionality. Keep things as simple as possible.

On thursday I have a meeting with a new customer at which we'll talk about customized online store. I'll try to stick to these simple rules and see how it goes.

Here comes pacman...

Hello everyone! Welcome to my new home page. I hope this one will stay around for at least a few years. I've decided to start with a blog and add my projects and book section later on. Too much at once never works out well, so I've taken approach to do just one step at a time. Is this gonna change anything? I don't know.. Time will tell.

So... a little bit about myself. Technology is one of my passions, I spend a lot of time reading, thinking and living IT. I see a great potential in new ways of solving problems. Ever since I got my first PC (somewhere around 1993) I'm constantly amazed at what possibilities it gives. 20 years ago it was virtually impossible to chat with your friends from all over the world, listen to personalized radio station and buy some books at the same time. Right now this is a very common thing. My personal goal is to create great tools that help people in their everyday tasks, to push the technology to the next level. Sounds like a lot for just one coder, huh? ;)

Why a totally new blog? Why not just use wordpress or typo or anything already available in the wild? Several reasons. First one - it's a nice experience to create your site from scratch. Especially one that's supposed to represent me in some way. The other reason is that I can customize it any way I want. I can literally add ANY functionality and it will work the way I tell it to. That's a great advantage. And the last, but not least - I can test all the new, nifty technologies! Right now I use Ruby on Rails with haml, sass and textile and utlizie OpenID for all my authorization needs. Soon I'll add an RSS feed and adjust templates for mobiles. Everything EXACTLY the way I want it. No existing solution can give me this!

Anyways, I hope I'll be able to squeeze out some time out of my schedule to share my ideas and projects with you through this web site. I also hope someone will actually read what I have to say and leave a comment from time to time. It's really nice to get some feedback on ideas you can't stop thinking about.

Enough for now. Stay tuned...