Hit Your Deadlines With These Tips

What is HTML All The Things?

HTML All The Things is a web development podcast and discord community which was started by Matt and Mike, developers based in Ontario, Canada.

The podcast speaks to web development topics as well as running a small business, self-employment and time management. You can join them for both their successes and their struggles as they try to manage expanding their Web Development business without stretching themselves too thin.

What's This One About?

Deadlines can be difficult for developers to hit due to the complexity and scope creep that happens to most modern web development projects. We've experienced our fair share of quickly approaching deadlines over the years and have learned a collection of time saving methods that we'll be discussing in this episode. Methods like not oversharing with your client - so they don't constantly contact you about every little thing, and doing projects with the tool that makes the most sense - to avoid pigeonholing your toolset based on preference, and more!

Show Notes/Timestamps

• Don't Pidgeonhole Your Toolset | 00:01:34
  • Avoid taking hard stances on some tooling (ie no-code, just because it isn't 'real coding')
  • While it's good to avoid tooling that isn't a good fit for your project from a technical perspective, avoiding tooling just because it isn't what you prefer is horrible for productivity
  • If you don't learn new tools you'll miss out on opportunities that need skills in those tools
• Standardize Your Tools, Setup, and Procedures | 00:14:06
  • When you have tasks that you do repeatedly, it's good to standardize them so you can just go through a quick procedure to get them completed
  • Standardizing folder names is a good way to keep organized
  • Standardizing a backup procedure is always a healthy process to have on hand, because you should be taking backups wherever applicable/beneficial
• Don't Overshare | 00:26:18
  • When you share your work too early, you give your client something small to zoom in on and offer feedback/ask for changes
  • This can easily derail your workflow as you'll be bogged down working on something small that you thought you had completed
  • Instead show your clients a good amount of work (a large milestone, for example) so that they are giving feedback on the bigger picture, and not just a small thing like a slider element
• Do Projects in Phases | 00:34:51
  • Some projects are very large, encompassing many expertise across several teams
  • When projects are this large, there are often a lot of stakeholders, a situation that may become cumbersome for decision making ("too many cooks in the kitchen")
  • If you break projects into phases with proper milestones, stakeholders have less decisions to make (they'll discuss one phase at a time) and can come to conclusions faster
  • Because the entire project isn't done at once, features are often completed faster, and superfluous work may be avoided altogether if a phase is noticed as useless during its discussions

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