Developers move the codes around, what else!

2018 has been quite a year!

Like with anything else, there were good times and there were times that I buried in Mariana Trench. But I would say the positivities outweighs the latter one.

Throughout, I worked with few projects - from working on a Magento 2 headless project to setup startup projects. That in turn gave me a broader window to work with from seasoned pro developers to mid/junior developers, from Global/EMEA Magento Practice Leads to out-of-the-box new project managers. Now, if you'd ask for my experiences, I would say, the aspect of experiences can be described, primarily, in two ways - developer to developer experience, developer to project manager experience.

Firstly, being a Magento Backend developer, my experience to work with all these developers throughout 2018, was great! I was part of a team and delivered tasks for our first Magento 2 headless project. And that project then secured an award from MageTitans. It was a great time to work with the team and new technologies where very few walked that time. And I would say the award from MageTitans is well deserved. I contracted with one my friends/peers on a large-scale Greenfield project after we left our previous agencies.

There were times, when I required to help other devs with testing/PR reviews while also committing my own tasks. And there were also times when I required help from my peers - they had to hear my nags and grunts. To manage this developer centric support was not a big issue. It's because with all developers, we share few things in common - we code and develop in general, we often don't like other developer's code, but we support one another at the same time, we tend to say yes to a problem even problem is an abstract one, we often don't appreciate project managers and tend to suggest better ways, I mean best possible ways, to approach a project's/client's tasks.

In fact, this leads me to start describing my developer to project manager experiences. The more projects I have been working with, the more it sounds and feels like - there has always been a tricky but rather imbalance issue between developers and project managers to solve for a CTO/CEO. And believe me or not this is a global thing. I think, this imbalance is mostly to do with approaching and managing tasks i.e. better project scoping, allowing developers to investigate a task prior to estimate, allowing contingency on task estimates, build up an understanding that developers also have family life etc. There might be very few Magento agencies where this balance has been achieved between developers and project managers. I would not be surprised if there aren't any!

I worked for projects where the functional specifications were not properly defined in relation to all development tasks. And we kind of figured our own way out as we progressed with build phase. I also worked in situations where support tasks were pre-estimated without involving me in the investigation phase and I was given time to complete those tasks. The end results were full of frantic efforts and repeat commits - which I don't really appreciate. If you were in similar situations you would know what I am trying to explain here, lol.

The clear picture?

The intricacies are pretty straightforward - when a project's functional specifications and scopes were not defined to its best right after its discovery phase, it is more likely and evident that, some tasks will be popping up as the project's development phase progresses. Similarly, if any support based tasks were not given relevant time to investigate/estimate and fix would not be ideal.

What happens next is, in either of the cases, it starts a chain of actions and reactions. To be precise, Sir Issac Newton's law has been so true. We, the developers unwittingly inform project managers about these not-scoped tasks or client found another bug(s) on already completed tasks and try to give most feasible estimates or re-estimates. While project mangers relay this unwanted news to clients and in turn they become the most unwanted persons waving a white flag in front of clients. The end result of a project or of a support task has not always been that fruitful but something to appreciate though.

However, put everything aside, I warmly thank to my fellow peers/colleagues :).

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