You will probably laugh. Back in the day, when I was a full stack web developer, with a preference on databases and backend, I somehow thought that content is not my problem. I thought that my responsibility starts and ends with provisioning for a table or a few tables, related in one way or another, a content management platform implementation tailored to a fixed set of requirements and meant to be used by anyone else other than myself to add the content. End of the day, I have already done the hardest part, right?
So there I was. Like many many other developers, I have spent my days and sometimes nights, to draw up diagrams, tables and databases, write the codes, test it and deploy it. Make it functional and decent looking. Finishing up with the How-tos of the already( or so I thought ) straightforward templates and features.
As a Team Lead later, I have ensured with all the power I could have, that my developers will always worry about structure, about codes, about symmetry and clean codes. About best practices. About various frameworks and content management platforms. My developers will not spend time dealing with content. We are busy.
Are you laughing yet? I am curious person and an ambitious person. I want to improve, know more, learn more. So, through experience, through various client projects and clients and endusers interactions, I realized that all the painful and endless change requests thrown my way by the client, were not misguided and were not from poor planning of the client( ok, maybe sometimes they were ), but they were from evolution. The client, the Marketing Manager, was trying his/her best to keep up with the endless changes and endless needs of the customer, in the here and now time. Communication is hard and so it’s understanding the customers. Even as developers, we must acknowledge and we must make an effort to deeply understand the client, his/her vision and goals and translate them into a platform, for them to use. Listen, understand, communicate, be agile. Adapt and iterate.
Now, just to avoid any misunderstandings, I still believe that the job of a developer is not to input content into a CMS. In the same time, it’s fine if as developer, you are not there yet. Or if you have an amazing consultant and project manager with you to help you translate and interpret clients and visions. But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to learn that more than a CMS, or a bunch of codes, the job of developers is also to provide guidance, to provide value and to translate the world into code. And by that I mean, listen, understand, communicate, build, communicate, educate, adapt, deploy and iterate all over again.
Did you laugh?