Introduction
Aaron Carlino is one of those developers that make writing code look completely effortless. Which is something most of us designers, by our very nature, struggle with all the time. On many occasions I’ve picked his brain for some help where my logic falls short and he’s always willing to lend a hand.
Aaron is a strong advocate for Silverstripe and has contributed to its community with a number of awesome modules. Recently I got a chance to send him the questions that follow. His responses are thoughtful and witty. Enjoy!
MIB: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for MyInkBlog Readers. Tell us a little about yourself and how you got started in web development.
AC: When I was growing up in New Hampshire, my talents were spread all over the map. I was really good at a lot of things, but not excellent at any specific one. I was a great writer, musician, French speaker (believe it or not), and of course a seasoned computer dork, having been one of the first kids in my class to get a personal computer in 1986 (a blazing 8 mhz processor paired with a dazzling 4-color monitor). When I went to college at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, I had no idea what I wanted to do and ended up being ushered into a journalism/music double major to even further carry out my indecision. Interestingly, the journalism program included a class called “New Media,” which was basically a 15-week exposure to the latest techniques in web development, using Microsoft Frontpage. I decided then that I would never be interested in web work. Could you have blamed me?
After school, I spun my wheels for several years, not able to figure out how to harness all the things I was interested in. I was taking a graduate class in Education at the time, and someone mentioned that another local college, Champlain College, had great multimedia programs. It intrigued me. When I spoke to an advisor with questions about where I might fit in, she said openly, “If you want to get a job, choose web. There are ten web jobs for every one graphics job right now.”
I had flashbacks to my college class in that dank computer lab, dragging around cheesy clipart and testing in IE 4.0, and told her I had, well, been there, done that. She told me about Dreamweaver, and that it was a markedly better than Frontpage, and I agreed to take a class, provided I didn’t have to write any code.
I think I knew within six weeks of taking that class that web development was the perfect marriage of all my interests. I could design and I could write, all while stimulating my quirky obsession with following rules and conventions. When I learned about XHTML and CSS, and the “right” way to do build a web page, I lit up with excitement, and I was pretty much a goner from there.
I had an internship months after I finished that program, which I leveraged into a full time job at Bluehouse Group. It’s a small firm of 10 people. I mostly do programming and any heavy lifting for our Silverstripe sites. We’ve got a great team, and I’m lucky to work with such a talented group of people.
Sometimes I have a hard time believing I’ve made a livelihood of something I never imagined I’d enjoy doing or even be capable of doing . I’ve become a really good programmer, and a proficient systems administrator, and I’m really proud of that. My eye for design gets better with every site I build, which is shocking because I was always that kid in art class who would rather eat his crayons than put them on paper.
MIB: You are an advocate of the SilverStripe CMS. Talk a little about how you first got started with SilverStripe and what advantages it has over some of the more popular CMS projects out there.
AC: Back in the fall of 2007, Bluehouse Group was very actively seeking an open source alternative to a proprietary CMS that was in an advanced state of technological decay during the tide of Web 2.0 trends. I had been tasked with evaluating our options, and was quite overwhelmed. After all, there are thousands to choose from. One of the other developers at Bluehouse Group caught wind of Google’s endorsement of Silverstripe for its Summer of Code and recommended I give it an evaluation.
I followed the tutorials and was not only impressed, but also relieved. Finally, I thought, developer freedom in a CMS. I knew other CMSes allowed custom code and templating, but Silverstripe was just so much more inviting to both PHP coders, databasers, and XHTML developers. The Sapphire PHP framework is really well-engineered and easy to use. The community is active. The documentation is ample. They just did a lot of things right, and it was an easy decision from there. Today, Bluehouse Group has launched about a dozen Silverstripe sites, and has contributed its own EventCalendar module to the community.
MIB: You’ve written and are working on a bunch of modules/extensions for SilverStripe. The image gallery extension is an awesome and very welcome addition. What additions, changes, and new modules do you have planned for the future?
AC: Right now more than anything, I really just need a break. I find that I’m really good at starting projects, but not very good at finishing them. The amount of time I spend supporting my modules is on the verge of exceeding my capacity. For now I plan to maintain what I have, and keep pushing the SS development team to showcase my work, and maybe even adopt it as part of the Silverstripe core. That would be a huge achievement, and would make all my efforts worthwhile.
If I were to embark upon a new project, though, it would probably be design related. One of the few pain points for me in Silverstripe is its arrant lack modern design aesthetic. It makes the product look a lot less competitive than it really is. I’ve always flirted with the idea of writing a new set of stylesheets for the Silverstripe CMS to give it a cleaner, sharper, less-Windows-98 look-and-feel.
MIB: You get a lot accomplished in a day. What sort of time management techniques can you share?
AC: The funny thing is, I’m actually quite horrible at managing my time. Most of my work gets accomplished in binges, rather than scheduled bite-sized chunks of time, which isn’t very healthy. My goal is to rein in the runaway hours I spend on Silverstripe and other web development and get them into a contained block of time every night or every other night, so that it’s still part of my life, but it’s balanced.
I have a lot of other things in my life that need to work in harmony with my obsession with web development. I’m still a newlywed and very much enjoying spending time with my lovely new wife, who is incredibly supportive of everything I do. She says she’s very impressed by my work with Silverstripe when I show it to her. I’m not sure if she completely gets it — probably not — but it doesn’t matter. The point is that I’m fortunate to have such an appreciative audience at home. I’m also now playing lead guitar in two different musical projects, which is a great outlet for me, but it also demands a lot more of my time, especially when the summer gigging season picks up. So like I said, it’s all about balance. I think personal fulfillment is a function of breadth, not depth.
MIB: What are some of your favorite sites that you have in your rss feed?
AC: Most of it ends up in my Trash because I can’t keep up with it all, but here’s the list:
- Authentic Boredom (Cameron Moll)
- A List Apart (duh…)
- Silverstripe Forums (major duh..)
- Clusterf*** Nation, a blog by irreverent social critic James Howard Kunstler
- Peak Oil News
I also love, but am not subscribed to: Coding Horrors, Smashing Magazine, and Garfield Minus Garfield.
MIB: Which technologies are you not proficient at; that you’d like to improve on?
AC: Design, design, design. I think of myself as really a well-rounded developer, but design has always been a point of friction for me. I can usually get something decent eventually, but I go through so many iterations and mental blocks that I sink far too many hours into the design phase of a project. I’d love to learn more about the mechanics of good design — the grid, color scheming, and especially typography. If I had the time, I would audit a graphic design 101 class at Champlain, but I’m not sure where I’d fit that in at this point.
One of the most impressive skills to me is the ability to create a clear, usable, friction-free web interface. It’s something I really love doing myself, too, when I’m actually good at doing it, that is. Some of my favorite web interfaces include CampaignMonitor, Mint.com, and Basecamp.
MIB: What one piece of advice would you give to an aspiring web developer just starting out?
AC: Start building stuff. Now. There is no course or book that is going to teach you as much as you’ll learn just building a site. You just have to do it. As much as I value my experience at Champlain College for getting me started in web development, I haven’t used a single thing I learned in any of those courses, and no employer has expressed any value for my formal web education, only my portfolio. In school they taught us to use tables and font tags in the Web Development course, and that was in 2006. The server-side scripting course was Perl. They still, not even in 2006, had recognized PHP as a viable server side language. I later got a D on a client-side scripting project because I insisted on using jQuery, which the professor adamantly believed was “cheating.”
The problem is that no curriculum or book can realistically keep up with the forces of change in the web. All you’ll get is a snapshot of what was happening at the time it was engendered.
So my advice is to find a friend or relative that needs a website and offer to do it for free. Use resources on the web like webmasterworld.com, htmlforums.com, and graphicdesignforums.com to get experienced eyes on your work and revise, revise, revise. Keep at it, and never let yourself become a “heads down” developer. Part of your job every day is to be attentive and interactive with what is going on in the trends of web design and development.
MIB: What other developers have helped you along the way?
AC: The most pivotal point in my growth as a web developer I owe to my best friend since kindergarten. He is a very skilled and experienced programmer, and has been coding since he was in diapers. When I started to get more into web stuff, he offered to help me out with learning PHP, even though he had never seen or written a single line of it. He haughtily told me he could teach it while concurrently learning it, so I agreed to spend a weekend down at his place in Boston, taking a crash course in PHP from someone who was as new to it as I was.
I remember that weekend well — sitting in a dimly lit room on a thrift store sofa, huddled around a 13″ Macbook, surrounded by PHP books stacked as high as the empty take-out containers. The following day, I boarded the subway, squinting beneath the first rays of sunshine I had seen in 48 hours, with my laptop in tow, chock full of partially-working scripts for a homegrown website administration panel. When I got back home, I took it from there.
I still communicate with him almost every day. We have an almost eerily perfect intellectual barter system arranged. He helps me with some of the more advanced principles of object-oriented programming and database queries, and I get him out of a jam when his company calls on him to build a web interface, and he’s stymied by menial pixel-pushing tasks. It works really well, and I’m lucky to have such a great resource at my disposal.
MIB: Mac or PC, why?
Mac, and I ain’t goin’ back.
One of my favorite quotes came from a critical comment in the blogosphere during the peak of iPhone hype. It said, “Apple is the world’s only publicly traded religion.”
So as a mindful Apple disciple, it behooves me to give the requisite response to your question — “Because it just works.”
Now that that’s out of the way, I think there’s much more to it than that. Apple is simply transcendent in their ability to innovate and design at the same time. I think the OSX interface, for example, is just a triumph of usability and sets exactly the sort of example we need in a world where the envelope between man and machine is becoming increasingly transparent. Apple products accommodate every detail. They anticipate every need. They always have the user in mind. I think the major difference between an Apple and Microsoft is that Apple /designs/ their products while Microsoft /evolves/ their products. Their ability to stay on the leading edge and raise the bar is what I find most inspiring as a developer.
Final Thoughts
That wraps up this interview. If you want to drop Aaron a line, please do so using the comment form below.
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Contribute
kurrent
March 19, 2009
great interview, look forward to more.
steve
March 20, 2009
I’d hire you in a minute, Aaron Carlino, if I could come up with the money and had the authority. If our college ever loses its current Webmaster or Graphic Arts Specialist, I feel you would be able to do both jobs….amazing talent and time manager. Now, don’t forget about the life balance factor…..enjoy!
Tyler
March 20, 2009
I grew up in Vermont and Moved to New Hampshire for school. It’s nice to see people over here be successful!
Tyler´s last post was… Inspiration: These websites are not white
Aram
March 21, 2009
Great interview, very insightful. I’ve been working with Aarron recently and he’s a top guy :)
EvermaTeemhaf
May 20, 2009
Fantastic info=) I will definitely come back again soon.
Jacklee
June 1, 2009
I’m absolutely disguested by your discussion on regular expressions.
I seriously feel ill right now.
You are supposed to be some of the best devs out there, and you can’t grok one of the simplest programming devices ever created?
You reasoning behind not using this tool is the same reasoning behind not using ANY tool. “People won’t understand it.” If this were true, then maybe we shouldn’t use javascript at all. After all, it is pretty complex and I might have to learn something new to figure out what is going on.
You have done your listeners a great disservice by suggesting that they don’t try to better themselves as programmers. By suggesting that they write many lines of error prone logic of for loops and if statements to match text that could otherwise be matched by a regular expression.
I have no suggestion for you other than: 1. better educating yourselves, 2. mastering new skills rather than suggesting certain skills are unimportant when obviously you are not masters of them and 3. recant your possition.
Finally, I would like to quote Ted Neward to you: “You are wrong. You are wrong.”