It’s time for a pep rally folks. It will be opinionated, so if you have thin skin put on some fire-retardent clothing. First off, a little sharing (which we’re all about here at Whole Wheat College).

Last Spring I went to Orlando for the php|tek conference. It was the first time the conference was being held in the United States, and it was going to be my first straight-up geek con. I’d been to two Carnegie Communications conferences previously (and my dinner/bar tab is probably the reason they’re out of business), but I had never been to anything that spoke to the programmer in me. It turned out to be one of the most trying and disappointing periods of my career.

Have you ever had an experience that shook-up your sense of self-identity? When I first came to college, coming from a rural Southern high school, I thought of myself as a hippy. After all, I had long hair. Warren Wilson taught me very quickly that I had no idea what a hippy really could be. That dissillusion turned out well because I started balding shortly thereafter and I sure didn’t want a “skirted eggshell.” A Webmaster looks good in short hair. I went to the PHP conference after successfully deploying a slick and timely web application on campus that I had written from scratch. I thought I could go and knock-out the Zend certification exam and then I could add the “PHP Developer” notch to my belt. Boy was I wrong.

Real PHP Developers are apparently often humorless Germans that would as soon as spit on you as look at you. If a presenter at the con spoke English without an accent, chances are he was using a language made up entirely of cryptic acronyms to compensate. Needless to say, I was a complete n00b (OMG PWNED!!1!). These guys weren’t in a different league; they were in a different sport. I learned that writing PHP for a handful of users at a small college is nothing like working on Enterprise-level applications designed to be used by thousands of concurrent users and developed by huge teams of programmers. These guys spent hours discussing development frameworks, OOP practices, and the minutiae of programming methodology that I had never been exposed to. Mercifully, the Zend people didn’t reveal my actual score on the certification exam. I think maybe it was in the 10% neighborhood. My companion and I joked that we should show Rasmus some of my code to see whether he would smite us or just start crying at the damage we had wrought with his language.

For several weeks following the conference I was very depressed. I felt as if I could not succeed or fit-in within any of the fields I straddled in my one-person-shop position as Web Director (Webmaster) of a small private college. If I looked deep enough into graphic design, marketing, programming, or any of the other tags on the various hats I wear, I would find that I was an amateur at best. After a few months of reflecting on what that means, I’ve come to the conclusion that being a jack-of-all-trades in a small, do-it-yourself environment is just dandy.

Here’s why (and all you small school Webmasters feel free to grab your pom-poms or face-paint and join in. And if this sounds like a repeat-this-to-a-mirror self-help session… well.. shuddup):

I have importance and effect. I have heard of so many disaffected folks working with computers who feel like they cannot appreciate the fruits of their labor. At the end of the day, they can’t point at some object like a house or piece of furniture and say “I built that.” I can do that. I see the positive results of the work that I do every day. It isn’t subsumed into some group project. It isn’t someone else’s vision that I can’t take credit for. When the conversion rate or market data is measured, I’m doing the measuring and seeing how my work has affected the world. It’s mine. I’m free to take pride in it, to show it off, and to work to improve myself when I screw up. Only an old-school Webmaster can have that kind of experience day-in and day-out.

I never get bored. If I do too much PHP development I can always don a different cap and start designing in Photoshop. I can grab my camera and head outside on a nice day to work on getting some new photography for the site. I can write copy for rotating features. I can read A List Apart, Seth Godin, and PHP Architect with equal interest and a level of understanding that, while not as deep as it could be, is still adequate. When it comes to professional development, I have an array of possible paths to take at any point. I can learn video editing, learn Flash, play around with creating and editing audio. It’s not only relevant, it’s expected, and I’m provided funding, time, and support for any of these things that I want to undertake.

I never feel powerless. I have no bureaucratic filters to go through, I have no redundant staff duplicating my efforts in two other departments, and I don’t have problems coordinating teams or garnering campus buy-in. I sit directly on the group that governs how the college is marketed and can talk just as freely either with the President, Admission Dean, Academic Dean, or VP for Development. I can make decisions about web policy, design, and marketing strategies largely with impunity. I get to travel to interesting conferences frequently. I don’t know what working in a cubicle feels like.

I have marketable experience. When it comes time to move on, I will have the kind of options that a specialist doesn’t. I could go in-depth into design, marketing, programming, or become a project manager that continues to work in all these fields through management. Give me another five years and I will have that Zend certification, I will have a portfolio of some pretty nicely designed sites, and I will be able to talk branding jargon with the best of them.

So to all you bitter, disaffected folks out there who want to call the Webmaster dead and complain that you can’t be effective without a team, I say good riddance! All the more fun and opportunity for those of us jack-of-all-trades who step in to take the spots you vacate. You can build your teams and ride this Web 2.0 wave of funding and interest and when the wave crests it’ll be your budget (and maybe your job) on the block. Meanwhile, us lowly Webmasters will have undergone our trial-by-fire and will be ready and willing to step in to fill the need for generalized talent that can work quickly and efficiently in a team of one.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Personal. It has been viewed 1404 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

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