By this, I mean trust your developers and allow them to think and move at their own free will. Placing restrictions on your developers and micromanaging them causes serious negative consequences that ultimately hurt both the developer by destroying their morale and the company because they will not get the performance they want from that employee.

Many companies have given their employees the freedom to make major decisions within the company, and this proves to be highly successful because those employees tend to be more innovative since they have the creative freedom therefore the results are much more desirable.

This isn’t to say you should just let your developers do whatever they want without any oversight, but to just give them some freedom. Limiting developer freedom within the company seems to be a common trait in the central valley and hopefully that can change one day. If the central valley wants to be more cutting edge like the bay area they need to make some adjustments such as this to spin up more of a desire for developers to work here.

If you’ve ever worked at a tech company you know there are two kinds of people:

The kind who go to college, get their degree, apply for a job, get the job and *just* do their job. They come in at 8, go home at 5. Never buy new books to learn new languages and features. It’s just a job to them. These are career programmers.

Then there’s the guys who stay until 8, pushing hard to get their task done. Going home, writing more code. Buying new books all the time possibly to learn new languages. Just a general love for programming and the web in general. These are the passionate programmers.

A lot of companies tend to want to hire the first type of person because they feel it provides them with “security” because they will obey rules, never come in late, and can be molded to be whatever you want at a lower cost. I think that represents a problem and causes more harm than good. I personally believe one passionate programmer is worth two to three career programmers. You should always push your team to be on the cutting edge and learning. Always!

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with people who love to just write code for their job and make their company a lot of money. But at the same time, I want my fellow programmers to also push themselves to the limit. I want them to succeed in coming up with new and innovating ways to tackle a problem. As Google says, I want my fellow programmers to do the impossible. And then some. With a career programmer this is very difficult because of the lack of dedication to code as a lifestyle.

If you want a solid team that believes in your product, hire a team of passionate programmers. Let your company flourish in people who love code.

Would you be interested in attending a local StartupWeekend event and build an awesome product in just 54 hours? Recently myself and another local entrepreneur have been in discussion and are looking to organize a StartupWeekend hosted here in Fresno. If you’re not aware of what StartupWeekend events are please read more here.

With the success of the 59 Days of Code event, we feel there is a large market here in Fresno for people wanting to build some amazing products.

We already are looking into pulling in some sponsorships as well as other resources especially since the other guy I am discussing with has attended a StartupWeekend in Los Angeles prior. So I put together a quick questionnaire and would like if you could quickly fill it out for us.

StartupWeekend Fresno Questionnaire

If we get enough responses and it seems the local tech talent is interested we’ll get this going. We’re looking towards a date some time in November especially since people are fresh off their 59 Days of Code code rush they did the past two months.

Please spread the word!

I’m not going to go much into the concepts of client-side storage within the browser except to say previously our main mechanism was cookies.  And using a small key/value pair with cookies blows.  Now let’s move on.

Concept

The idea behind the new client-side storage features with HTML5 is that we need a way to store data within the browser conveniently and easily.  So they came up with (so far) three concepts I think hit most needs for users and that is Session, Local and Database.

Session Storage

Session storage is pretty similar to cookies except that you can store much more data.  Also, session storage isn’t always sent to the server every time as cookies are so you have much more control over what gets sent.  And lastly, you can control session storage on a per window/tab context so the storage item is not global across the whole browser session.

// Store the item
sessionStorage.setItem('email', 'robert@robertschultz.org');
// Display the value, note how we can use typed properties here
alert(sessionStorage.email);
// Remove the item
sessionStorage.removeItem('email');

Local Storage

Local storage is considered more of a global persisted storage, similar to persisted cookies so even when the browser is closed it’s still there next time.  Neat!

// Store the item
localStorage.setItem('email', 'robert@robertschultz.org');
// Display the value, note how we can use typed properties here
alert(localStorage.email);
// Remove the item
localStorage.removeItem('email');

Database Storage

This is where it gets fun and interesting.  With HTML5 now we get a miniature database engine within our browser.  Oh man the possibilities.  Can you imagine with your application with data that normally never changes, so store that within the browser now as structured SQL data?  No more having to even hit the server to do lookups or do a cache server lookup we can just store it within the browser now.  From what I know, each browser can implement whatever database engine they want but most are using SQLite.

// Attempt to open database 'Users' for version '1.0', if it fails, change the DB version to '1.0' and create the default structure
var database = openDatabase('Users', '1.0', 'My Users DB', 5*1024*1024, function(db) {
    db.changeVersion('', '1.0',
        function (t) {
            t.executeSql('CREATE TABLE user (id, name)');
        },
        error
    );
});

// Creates a read transaction to read users
database.readTransaction(function (t) {
    t.executeSql('SELECT * FROM Users', [], function (t, r) {
        // Alert the name for the first user
        alert(r.rows[0].name);
    },
    function (t, e) {
        // Could not read database
        alert(e.message);
    });
});

I am already beginning to use some of these techniques within my own applications. They are very powerful as you can see. Another reason why I am excited for more upcoming HTML5 features!

Some people have their opinions on why Fresno companies can never meet the level of atmosphere of what you get in the bay area, but I think there are a few that are common across the board.  But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today.

With all of the programmers I’ve met over the past few years in the valley especially with the explosion of Twitter I find a lot of people complaining about the same thing: lame work environments, restricting internet access, more and more rules every year, bad management of teams, removing perks like sodas, etc.

I want to address some of the things I see over and over and give my two cents on some of the topics, hoping that maybe some local companies can ‘get it’ and try to create better environments for programmers.  The first one I want to start with today: Loyalty.

Loyalty, Build It

Building loyalty between management and developers is key.  You have to not assume that you are doing your employees a favor by employing them.  They are engineers.  They are architects.  The software industry is usually always booming so you should do what you can to be loyal to your employees.  If you are loyal, you will most likely gain a loyal employee base as a result.  And we respect that.

When you create an ecosystem of loyal developers, you can always know that when things take a turn for the worse for you, they will be there to stick with you through thick and thin.  There is nothing worse than a company shitting on their employees only to wonder why everyone starts jumping ship once things turn sour.

One thing to show your employees your loyalty to them could be to let them know how great of a job they are doing and how much you appreciate them and their hard work.  Just a simple thank you even can boost someones confidence and loyalty to you.  It’s the little things that count sometimes.  Or making sure you pay top notch for great talent.  Don’t lose good programmers because you didn’t want to fork out the extra $5,000 per year sometimes that talent is a lot more valuable to you than not.

When you create a loyal employee you create a happy employee.  And when you have a happy employee you get results.

HTML5 Readiness Chart

BTW, Paul Irish was one of the funniest speakers I’ve seen at a conference ever.

Some of the major features I’ve been waiting for with an iPhone are finally here and am glad I am able to upgrade for the $199 price today.  Most importantly the HD video recording, LED flash, 5-megapixel camera and double RAM are all exciting features I think the iPhone has been needing over the last year to keep up with the Android phones that are being released.

Now, I just got to get my 3GS sold this morning so I can go down and get it!

So tonight I am going down to watch who will win the contest (rooting for my friends Out of Eggs and MealZing!) and I am wishing luck to everyone.

On a positive note, I have had more time now to put some focus back into Auralify and I wrapped up most of the design this past weekend. My goal is to have most of the application written in the next month with a beta expected shortly after that.

Good luck!