On Good Communication

Posted by Anita Zein on May 8, 2010

Good communication attracts great clients and bring about the happiest of team.

Anita Zein writes about the importance of communicating good especially in the wonderful chaos that comes with her project management turf. Anita is the Project Manager at Stampede.

In the work we do, everything involves multi-directional communication: telephone, messages, faxes, emails, even notes. A successful project or product is often achieved only if all parties involved truly understand each others motivation and goals.

In almost all aspects, communication is the one definitive role in the success of a project.

Working separately of distance and time with the team and the client is a new experience to me. Face to face communication is easier, but it’s not always possible. Even so, there is no excuse for a disconnect in communication, especially with a number of supporting facilities that allow for effective and accurate transfer of information. Distance and time is no longer an obstacle now even if your team and your clients are not in the same location, or in the same country.

Here at Stampede, we use all sort of communication tools: Basecamp, instant messaging, voice conference, email, telephone. We even send each other reminders via ReminderFox. All these tools, when applied right, greatly facilitate the type of work we do, to help deliver ideas and keep us focused on details. I do find written communication more productive. To me, everything noted and recorded can always be quickly reopened and referenced at any point of project development. There is very little margin of misinterpretation too.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t depend sorely on communication tools. The most basics of communication delivery is also important to master. Firm messages are easiest to understand while properly composed questions will encourage productive discussion and further attention to details. Keep your communication clear and concise. Without it, misinterpretation is bound to happen and I have seen plenty of problems resulting from the tiniest of misunderstanding.

Any successful project accounts for delivery of work product on time and with agreed and planned quality. Poor communication can result in severe delays, uneven workload and consequently, hinder a company’s growth. Good communication, on the other hand, will attract great clients and bring about the happiest of team to work with.

(Image from MIX’s brilliant Building a Website, Explained)

Posted in Team Add Comment »

My Path So Far

Posted by Syazwan Hakim on May 1, 2010

“We are a company of perfectionists and working in this team has made me one too.”

Syazwan Hakim writes about the experience that led him to Stampede and what has transpired since. Syazwan is the Front-End Developer at Stampede.

My first experience with computer started in late 1997. Internet was still new and hype for many back then. I remember paying MYR1 for an hour of internet surfing at the nearby cybercafe. Since then, my interest in computer and internet blossomed quickly.

That was the era of addictiveness to Internet Relay Chat for windows or better known as mIRC. I did my very first mIRC Remotes against room menace such as spammers and abusive operators. That was the start of my programming experience.

In 2006, while studying at UniKL Malaysian Institute of Information Technology (UniKL MIIT), I learned to code in C++ and Java. I also did some part-timing, working on simple image processing. It was then that I recognized the importance of web image optimizing and how many different factors affect website load time. I also did some odd jobs at editing content in Joomla. That gave me a whole load of insight as to how Joomla works with HTML and CSS.

The Stampede Time

I was having my internship with a data company in KL when I was asked to try out the position of Front-End Developer at Stampede. Being an undergraduate, seeing real web developers in action has always interests me so I jumped on the plane to meet the lead developer, Dov. With what very little knowledge in programming, I absorbed the work culture and training pretty quickly.

Throughout the learning process in April 2009, I was in Langkawi during the weekends and then hurry back to KL for my internship work during weekdays. Because of the limited time, most of my practice happened remotely.

Dov taught me a few essential front-end guidelines that are important to Stampede: paying very close attention to design details in PSD artwork, W3C validation, cross-browser testing, semantic code and proper documentation among all. Most importantly, he also encouraged me to Google things up to build my web vocabulary.

Under Dov’s guidance, I began work with my first project. It was for one of our clients in the US. I didn’t look back. Back in KL, I started to explore more about HTML/CSS. I’ve found that the only way to truly master building front-end pages is through a lot of practice. So practice and practice I did.

As a rookie, I did encounter issues that I was too green to fix myself. But then again, I have Google. During my first few months at Stampede, I relied heavily on Google and the rest are pure trial-and-error until I’m satisfied that the issues are fixed. Like most of us, I was having a hard time trying to render everything correctly on IE6 and IE7. I didn’t know that Stampede used to cater to IE 5.5 even!

How It Has Been

I think that a front-end developer holds a very unique position in a team. You have to be well-versed in both design and web programming. You need to know what the web designer wants to achieve and how to build the code efficiently for the web programmer. We’re very particular about design details (whitespace, text leading, typography etc) and it’s a very rewarding challenge for me to build webpages that are as accurate to the artwork as possible while still keeping them organized, efficient and valid. We are a company of perfectionists and working in this team has made me one too.

The Road From Here On

Despite the workload, learning new things is necessary too. You shouldn’t get too comfortable with the knowledge you have at present. Take the initiative to try something new and see how far you can go. I’m now going into some Javascripting and using frameworks like Mootools and jQuery. XHTML/CSS templating into Joomla is next on my list. Huge thanks to my Stampede team for their encouragement and guidance.

So that’s my story of how I became Stampede’s front-end developer. How about you? What’s your story?

(photo and more Lego Star Wars by Mike Stimpson)

Posted in Team Add Comment »

On-Campus Interview

Posted by Shaza Hakim on April 20, 2010

“Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.”

Shaza Hakim fulfills her duty (so requested by Shaiful Borhan) as the chronicler of Stampede Design’s annual on-campus interview at Universiti Teknologi Petronas. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

Consider An On-Campus Interview

You are an IT student, black circles under your eyes from that last attempt at submitting your Final Year Project in one coherent piece. You have an interview with a web company and you’ve heard all sort of cautionary tales and advise about your future career.

The university indulges you but being in IT, you can’t help but feeling marginalized over your fellow soon-to-be engineer friends. This is after all, an engineering university, where engineering future is made.

You are under-motivated, overworked and just barely made it to your 8.30 am interview. You heard you are one of six students selected from a pool of forty. You’re confident that your well-ironed shirt will leave a good impression, until you see another student arrived in a black suit with a sleek briefcase in tow, looking all polished and caffeinated. Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.

You walked into the interview room and exchanged greetings with the interviewers. They looked young and somewhat casual, probably mid-20s. They screened your resume and you started to sweat. You began to wonder if you spelled “proficient” correctly. Acting nonchalant, you flashed your biggest smile. Then one of them shot the first question,

“How good are you with PHP?”

I dare say the students we interviewed that Friday morning were in for a surprise.

Why We Interview?

To most companies, this is a blasphemy. “Of course you interview to hire more people in order to grow your business and generate more income.” I disagree.

Stampede’s hiring rate is one person a year, but we work hard and interview far and wide to get that one person. I believe that you do not have to hire many to achieve whatever goals you choose for your company. In most cases, you’re only adding unnecessary overhead to your otherwise agile and flexible team.

The number of employees you have is not a prerequisite to a successful business. You can be successful by staying small if staying small means keeping your people happy and giving your client work quality no bigger company can. By hiring at the rate of one person a year, Stampede is able to focus on training and introduction to our work culture, not by how quickly the person can start hacking codes. Most importantly, we are able to grow sustainably, without compromising our values.

Why Fresh Graduates?

Amazingly, this is the least-tapped pool of young talents in Malaysia. Most companies either look for candidates with significant industry experience or fresh grads with outstanding academic qualifications. Passion is often not in the equation.

Here’s what I think. People with experience tend to have one very big disadvantage: they bring with them culture from their previous work place. When they join Stampede, they tend to be highly individualized, not ready to share knowledge or responsibility. They sometimes conflict sense of teamwork with personal gain. Stampede is an office-politic-free environment. We keep communication flat so we can avoid elaborate hierarchical structure. This is not the case with other working environment where hierarchy is a way to manage and control.

In my years of interviewing and hiring, I personally find that fresh graduates should truly be the darlings of the industry. They are young and idealistic, eager to be an active part of the team. They are not (yet) affected by bad life choices. Most importantly, they bring a different level of energy to a company.

Some managers balk at the training cost. It does take more effort and patience to guide these high-octane powerhouses towards the right direction, but at the end of the day, we are in the business of nurturing talent and giving them work they are passionate about.

When you have a team of people truly invested in their work, you are doing it right.

“How Good Are You With PHP?”

Because we have a web developer vacancy, Dov did the preliminary filtering this time around. He easily trimmed a stack of resumes into six short-listed faces – a feat I never quite managed to do. A resume can be very misleading, with happy internship pictures and big company name-dropping. The most essential element we looked for was promising web programming skill. You may have interned at Intel but if you’re not good in PHP, then we’d rather not be wasting your time.

Dov as usual, was very direct about his requirements. He’s very involved with the hiring process of any new programmer and can be brutal with questions. There were times when I wished I weren’t in the student’s shoe. I am sure Shaiful and Guo Lin know this well. When he’s interested with a student’s PHP work, Dov would reach across the table, grabbed the laptop and dissected the code himself. It wasn’t a pretty sight when he ever-so-gloriously did an SQL injection vulnerability test via the login prompt. The student went pale. He only got his colors back when Dov said “That’s okay, you’re new.”

My questions, on the other hand, were centered more on the soft skills – what aspect of web development that really interests the student, what he aspires to, what an ideal workplace is like to him. These are important because we are, at the most basic, a team. We spend a great deal of time working together so the next person to join the team should be just as fun. Besides, I was due for a Stampede dinner that weekend to relay the summary of our interview to the rest of the team.

Some of the students however, were interested in other fields. One was into computer networking and the other quite a decent ASP programmer. They were honest enough to let us know the type of work they’re interested in. You could easily see that these are good students, though perhaps misguided by their seniors to simply settle for any job opportunities.

My advise in return, don’t compromise your interest. There’s only so much opportunity in life to do what you love, so start steering your way towards that now.

Was It Worth It?

For sure. The students left the interview room happier than when they came in. That alone makes it a good interview day for me.

(wonderful photography by Antontang)

Posted in Team, Work 7 Comments »