I’ve recently written about CoffeeScript (more on that soon), and have been using it exclusively on a Sencha Touch application I’ve been working on. I’ve been using SASS on the same project, and both languages are lovely to work with. CoffeeScript, in particular, strikes me as the way JavaScript wants to be: it’s as though the language itself has been refactored.

But the real star of this story is neither CoffeeScript, nor SASS. The star—which I will introduce circuitously—is most notable when absent. At FreeAgent, I don’t use CoffeeScript, despite thinking it the most wonderful thing since discovering git autocompletions. Poor Robbie still hand-codes all our CSS (yes, even the amazing gradients you’ll see when the redesign hits), despite being desperate to use some SASS macros to tidy all that up for a much more declarative experience.

Personal project? I’m all over CoffeeScript and SASS like a cheap suit. Actual day job? Don’t touch it.

Why? Politics? Processing power? Reluctance to learn new stuff? If you’ve met any of the FreeAgent team, or seen the kind of kit we develop on, you’re laughing at all of these suggestions.

Simple: the personal project is on Rails 3.1. FreeAgent isn’t, yet.

Rails 3.1 has an amazing asset pipeline system that means you write your JavaScript and CSS using any language you like, with CoffeeScript and SASS being the defaults, and Rails automatically does the compilation steps before rendering the page. Write CoffeeScript, reload page, done.

As soon as you move outside a framework that does that for you, using any of these timesaving technologies requires you to invent a workflow upfront. Do you use Compass? Run a compiler from the commandline? Set watches on key-files? Keep your source out of the public tree?

These things are tricky enough for developers, as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to get CoffeeScript compiling on Windows, but when it’s time for a designer to dabble with SASS, and they’ve suddenly got to manage dependency lists, console input and source-compile relationships, the barrier is too high. Hell, engineers outnumber the designers five to one at FreeAgent, and we haven’t got around to using Sprockets to bring the asset pipeline to Rails 3 yet.

So, am I surprised that the uptake on these new technologies is low? No, not at all. Do I think they’re overhyped? Also, no, not at all. I think that JavaScript’s future looks a lot like CoffeeScript’s present: after all, there’s nothing stopping browsers from running CoffeeScript directly, and the same is true of LESS or SASS. At that point, the skills you pick up now from dabbling are going to be invaluable.

I think that Rails’s role in all of this is interesting, too. I’m biased, of course, but it does seem that Rails has proved to be a weathervane in the last 5 or 6 years, promoting the good path of RESTful, Test Driven development by making those things so accessible that you feel stupid not using them. That thinking has spread to other languages and frameworks, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to predict the same things happening with CoffeeScript and SASS, now that they’re the defaults in Rails going forward.

Regardless, we’re all getting back to the stage where maintainability is far, far more important than raw development speed, and that’s where all of these technologies shine. So adoption is slow just now, and may remain so, but getting in early will put you well ahead of the competition by the time the workflows have stabilised.

Besides, both CoffeeScript and SASS put a lot of the fun back into this whole racket, and the fun technologies always win eventually.

My son loves LEGO. He started with some Duplo (possibly the biggest “compatibility” hurdle faced) but soon grew out of that. I always viewed Duplo as a sort of gateway drug: fun enough to hook kids without the necessary dexterity to manipulate the smaller bricks, but also kinda rubbish. Nobody sticks with Duplo for long, I bet. The appeal of “real” LEGO is far too strong.

So he graduated through to LEGO. The look of glee and excitement on his face at the sound of those rattling bricks behind wrapping paper is matched by nothing else, except perhaps the look on my face. LEGO makes me feel like a kid again, and somehow, it seems to make my son feel like a kid again, despite being one still.

I think that’s a big part of the allure. LEGO lets you drop the mundane and rediscover wonder. I’m starting to sound like a marketing shill now, but seriously, I think that’s the nub of it. It’s a hobby that has no risk, whatsoever, of turning into a job. Most other hobbies that I have (web development, photography, design, writing) I could turn into a paid job if I wanted. There’s always that risk, and hence that desire to get “good enough” that you could go pro if you wanted to. I wonder how much of that is true about most hobbies.

Building LEGO models, though, is unlikely to form the basis of a freelance career. It’s utterly free of that, while still exercising all the bits of my brain and psyche that the other hobbies I mention do: it’s creative, constructive, productive, enjoyable, communicative and so on. And unlike say Airfix models, or Mecano, you typically need nothing but your fingers and your imagination to play with LEGO. Airfix requires paint, requires glue. Mecano requires tools. Both of these provide you with real world manual skills. LEGO doesn’t. The skills LEGO provides you with, as a kata, are mostly (if not exclusively) abstract. It exercises your imagination, your ability to create and mould within constraints, your understanding of engineering requirements (such as what stands up, what falls over, what needs support, load bearing, how many wheels can be used to create a stable platform).

You will go nowhere in life where your ability to click bricks together lands you a job, but you will encounter plenty of situations where your “LEGO mind” helps you overcome obstacles or crack problems like nobody else.

And of course, it’s amazingly fun. The sense of discovery as you follow the instructions, the simple teaching of techniques through showing. Nobody ever “taught” you that door hinges could be used to create smoothly curved surfaces when arranged just so, but some model you bought used that technique and guided you through it on your way to a different goal. You’re continually learning, and then adapting and re-applying that knowledge: learning by doing, with a clear motivation.

Seriously, the LEGO manuals are a thing of wonder. So compelling, with narrative structure some novels struggle to match. A good LEGO manual guides you through while still delighting you with moments of discovery and understanding. “What on earth is this bit for?” you wonder as you’re taken on a detour of component construction. When you turn the page, you find a reveal every bit as striking as the best detective novels. “Ah HAH!”, you think, and snap the pieces into place, with a sense of pride at having constructed something so clever.

It’s difficult to think of an experience quite as close to building LEGO, or one that demonstrates such an ability to exercise the abstract portions of your brain through the manipulation of physical objects. Take complex models, where you receive numbered bags, and build separate assemblages which then form compoentes in the finished whole. This modular approach to problem solving (and make no mistake, the finished model is a problem to be solved) is incredibly advanced, especially for toys aimed at four year olds, yet here it is, being shown, not told, to anyone willing to listen.

The ability to teach is something that fascinates me, has formed a key component of my life thus far. LEGO teaches in a way so radically different from what we usually call “teaching”, but in such a successful way, that I can’t help but think there’s so much to learn from it.

Challenege, play, demonstration, goal. These are the tenants of LEGO’s model. That I’m still excited by that rattle behind wrapping paper on my 32nd birthday is testament to its success.

physicality

As a baby, you have no control over your physical presence. You are completely subservient to the reflexes of your muscles and under the control of your physical needs. Your first years of being alive are a battle to master your physicality, beginning with smiling, crescendoing in your first steps, and finishing with your ability to eschew nappies.

emotion

Your emotions are the next adversary. As a toddler, you are entirely subject to your emotional mood swings. There is nothing unusual to you in this stage of being a mindless ball of rage one second, and then becoming as calm as a Hindu cow the next moment. You learn how to use your emotions as a tool during this phase, and that your emotions are just reactions, like the physical skills you now have a firm grasp of.

ego

After emotions, an awareness of self hits you. Your shyness and arrogance begin to own your experience of the world. You want to talk to that cute girl/boy, but your ego won’t let you. This is another tool, another skill you will acquire. You begin to understand that the key to winning these battles is to play them as games. Your teen years are spent learning how to play with ego, to play roles and characters.

reason

Rationality presents itself as an overarching tool. Play helps you understand the rules governing life: reason lets you codify and apply them. You now know how to overcome shyness and arrogance: with reason. You rationalise all previous stages and pat yourself on the back that you’re done. Reason can only take you so far, though. You can’t rationalise taste. You can’t reason luck. It’s still a crutch masquerading as a tool. Very few people move beyond reason, but those who do attain something special.

enlightenment

Moving beyond reason, with a firm mastery of all the previous tools, takes you into the realms of enlightenment. The full array of tools available to you now allows you to accomplish virtually anything. Kubrick, Welles, Disney, Branson, Jobs, Newton, Gandhi, Galileo: these are the craftsmen of our world. True artisans of humanity.

We should aspire to be as skilled in our humanity as we are in our professions. There is then very little that we can’t achieve.

But I digress. I’m a lefty, I believe in social justice (whatever that means), and yet I’m not wailing in the streets this morning, rending cloth and gnashing teeth.

Did I miss the memo? The Tories are coming! THE TORIES ARE COMING!

Well, no. I didn’t miss the memo. For one thing, it’s raining today, so I’m not going out unless I really have to, and for the other, well, I’m a little confused as to what we’re wailing about.

Oh, right. We’re headed back to the eighties. Fire up the Quattro and all that. Well, forgive me for not quite getting bent out of shape just yet. Here’s why:

Cause / Effect

We got the eighties because we had the seventies. Everyone hates Thatcher for smashing the unions, but what, exactly, was the alternative? Everyone hates Thatcher for ruthlessly privatising everything, but what, exactly, was the alternative?

This isn’t a post to praise Thatcher, not by a long shot. I mean to bury her, and perhaps even bury the spectre of her. Many of the problems she’s blamed for were the result of having to fix problems started by Labour mismanagement in the seventies. Yes, she was equally guilty of fucking things up, but run a little thought experiment: imagine the eighties under Callaghan. Now imagine the nineties after Callaghan.

It’s as easy to point to Thatcher’s Tories as evil because of what happened to this country in the eighties as it is to point to Blair’s Labour as wonderful because he inherited a country with a stable economy at the height of the dotcom boom, and had Liam Gallagher round for tea. We’re now in a situation where the country’s screwed, thanks to Brown’s handling of the economy and security, rapidly heading towards a police state, where graduates are unemployable and in massive debt, where using the internet is soon to be a crime, where we engaged in a war of aggression, colluded with war criminals, hounded out nay sayers, and bulldozed opposition in parliament because of a massive incumbent majority.

And we’re still talking about “short memories” because of Thatcher.

Balance

The argument against the Tories seems to be “anyone but the Tories”. How constructive. Whom? A party that, as it stands, is guilty of incompetence? An unproven party that has never taken power? Or a party that hasn’t been in power for over a decade, has (perhaps, perhaps not) changed since then?

Or is there an alternative?

What this country needs, more than anything, is balance, conversation, discussion and progression. What we have now is partisan, us and them bullshit threatening to drown out the point that something new is happening here: we have a coalition government, and one with a razor thin majority. Yes, it’s the Tories in power, but it’s the Tories relying on co-operation with the centre. We have Labour in opposition, and it’s Labour relying on co-operation to do their job of opposing.

In short, we have a potential parliament again: somewhere where bills may actually be debated and voted on an individual basis, not rammed through on whim *cough*DEBill*cough*. We have a parliament where our MPs might actually show up, because they might actually make a difference if they do.

We have the Tories in power, but a potentially powerful watchdog.

What if

So what alternatives were there? Clegg could have told Cameron and Brown where to go. Strategically, I’d have liked this. I’d have preferred Cameron attempting a minority government. It would have crashed and burned, and we’d have a general election in six months. In my little fantasy (indulge me), Clegg would have come out of the negotiations squeaky clean, having not compromised his principles, Labour would be adrift and unelectable after 13 years of mismanagement, the Tories would have very recently, very publicly fucked up after only six months, and Clegg would win in a landslide.

That option is still open to Clegg, but it’s unlikely to happen. The Liberals’ hold on the media has never been strong. He’d be painted as a modern-day Hamlet as fast as possible by both sides, and we’d get another minority result with the blame squarely on his shoulders in the public eye.

So he compromised. Get used to it. That’s what is hopefully going to dominate this government. Compromise. It’s what this country desperately needs, and it’s something we’ve never tried before. I could be wrong, the Tories may still be evil, and in twelve months we may be begging for mercy. But make no mistake, life under a continued Labour government was getting worse, and had to end. Five more years of Brown would have been five more years of criminality, public bailouts of private fuck ups, increased surveillance, hyper inflation and darkness. The 2010s are coming, regardless of who’s in power. We can’t afford “business as usual”, regardless of who’s in Number 10.

And if nothing else, this election was a ringing condemnation of “business as usual”.

More than any year since 2000, this has been a year of intense growth for me, both personally and professionally. Its end brings with it a shift in what I’m doing with my life, and 2010 brings with it two big steps that frankly scare the shit out of me, but in the best possible way.

And we’re still only in the first week of January.

So, big things. Those things have names.

Fresh Monkey

I’m a web construction worker. As Jough Dempsey said recently, “I make the Internet. Not all of it.” I’ve been doing that in various ways since 1998, and it’s still fun. I still can’t imagine doing anything else.

A lot of projects that I’m proud of made it out the door this year. Has 2009 been my most successful year? I don’t know how I’d measure that. Financially, the year ain’t over yet, and there’s still 4 or 5 projects that should ship within the month, so let’s reserve judgement on that for now.

For me, though, it’s the year I’m happiest with since my son was born, and that’s worth something.

A big contributing factor to that was managing to haul my lazy, self employed ass out of the dressing gown and into a proper office. Those of you who have visited us at cmdcentral may dispute the use of “proper”, but hey, it’s not a box room in my flat, which means I can leave work at work and “go home” at the end of the day.

Also helping along my mental health had been my move away from using a combination of Blinksale and Billings for invoicing. FreeAgent hasn’t saved my life yet (more on that in a moment), but it certainly meant I stopped waking up in a cold sweat wondering when the money was going to run out, and that’s a good thing when you’re self employed.

So what’s next for Fresh Monkey? Big things. We just went limited, and Anisa’s stepping in as project manager and co-director. Frankly, there’s too much work for just me any more, and I’d rather bring in more people than hand the work away to dreamweaver pilots, so watch this space. If you’re interested in knowing what I’ve got in mind, you should drop me a line.

So that’s big. What else?

FreeAgent

I’m not sure there are enough superlatives. Where else do you see support tickets like this one? Seriously, if you’re self employed, go and check it out. Even better, go and try it out using my kickback code and get yourself 10% off for life!

If you’re at all like me, you’re going to put off moving your accounts system over to them. You spent a long time setting up those spreadsheets, and they’re working just the way you like them. Why abandon that?

If rolling year-in-progress tax calculations, bank statement uploads and automatic invoice reconciliation, automated overdue reminders, recurring invoices, estimates and basic project management functionality doesn’t persuade you to at least try it out, how about this: I don’t know a single convert who has moved back.

Since day one, Ed, Roan and co have been obsessed with making an app that people like me want to use, and it shows.

Of course, there’s always room for improvement, and a quick glance at their Get Satisfaction community shows there’s no shortage of suggestions and requests from their rabidly enthusiastic users. So what’s a growing company to do?

Keep growing, seems to be their answer. They’ve got a new developer starting tomorrow, someone who I’m sure is going to be as fanatical about building a fantastic app as they are already, and will hopefully let them expand at an ever increasing rate.

I’ve been pestering them to let me help out for ages, as it’s been clear they needed and wanted more hands on the wheel, but they were adamant that they wanted to make a permanent hire, to have a senior developer on board 9-5, someone who would be in a position to really make a difference.

So when they said they wanted that developer to be me, I did what all gibbering fanboys do: I cried, and asked when they wanted me to start.

They said “How about the 6th of January?”.

Then they said “Oh, and if you want to keep your Fresh Monkey stuff running too, we don’t have a problem with that. Just try and get some sleep once in a while”.

Then I cried some more. Me, a respectable salaryman. Who’d have thought?

2010

So 2009 was awesome. Let’s look at the list for 2010:

• Working for a company I respect, on a product I love
• Growing a business I’m passionate about, working with more people I’m in awe of

And let’s not forget all the shiny new toys.

Welcome to 2010. It’s looking like a fun one.

2000: drank a lot of beer. A lot.

2001: graduated from Glasgow University.

2002: moved to Edinburgh.

2003: got engaged.

2004: got married.

2005: drank a lot of beer. A lot.

2006: became a dad.

2007: started to get the hang of this self employment thing.

2008: avoided moving house.

2009: took self employment out of the bedroom and into the office.

2010: to be continued…

One of my favourite places to visit in Glasgow when I was a teen was the Gallery of Modern Art, which I’m actually rather depressed about not having a website of its own. Maybe I should drop them an email…

Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to eviscerate art. It’s to eviscerate artists who pretend that they’re designers.

You heard me right. Eviscerate.

Design and art are creative. They require time, talent, an eye for aesthetic, for balance, and an understanding of the audience. They both generally exist to convey a message, and are both judged on their ability to convey that message.

But they’re completely different.

I said recently that, if there is some part of your “design” that I can’t argue with, then it’s not “design”, it’s art. I mean to expand on that a little.

But is it art?

Art is design minus accountability. it’s as simple as that. If your work answers only to you, to your muse, your whim, your own direction, then it’s art.

Design has much more of a load to bear. Design is directed creativity, where that direction comes from outside the creator. It’s art that you have to justify, and you have to justify with reason, not just with “but I like that bit”.

This reminds me of some advice I was given at school by one of my English teachers. She said, quite simply, “Kill your darlings”. This was in reference to short stories and essays, to creative work and also to critical work. I took the advice and my grades soared, but it took me a while to understand why.

Your overconfidence is your weakness

The weakest parts of your work are the bits you love. Having an emotional attachment to your work is fine. The bits that you “love“, though, are the bits you’ve lost the ability to be rational about. They’re the bits you’ll defend, the bits that, when the client hates them, will cause you to get offended and become bitter.

They’re the bits that stop you from being a designer.

Every designer’s job is to answer questions. The client asks us to achieve something, and we have to answer. How we respond is where we get to be creative, but if our work doesn’t answer the questions, we’ve failed, regardless of how beautiful it is.

So, every part of your design work must be open to challenge, to interrogation. If you’re unwilling to throw any part of your work out (given, of course, a cogent argument compelling you to do so), then you’re not designing. You’re painting, you’re putting your pleasure above your client’s, and you’re failing as a designer.

There’s a little bit of the darkness inside us all

I’m not saying this from an ivory tower. I’m saying this having produced work that falls into this category, both graphic design and code. I’ve been proud of things that have no place in designs, have no place in the medium I’ve chosen, and have been devastated when they’ve been (rightly) rejected.

I’m aware of my limitations as a designer, and would never call myself one. I play at design, I don’t work at it, and if challenged, I’d rather employ a designer than produce my own work.

What galls me is when designers don’t understand their own limitations, and produce work with no understanding of the questions being asked, no appreciation of the “why”. This is disappointing, frustrating and dangerous.

Wait, “dangerous”?

Yes, dangerous. Dangerous to my time and their health.

All web developers have, at one time or another, received artwork produced by “designers” with no understanding of the medium. The work has never been given any consideration other than “something pretty I once saw on a flash website”, and provides no direction on user interaction, accessibility, or anything else that constitutes what “works” on the web.

It would be like me calling myself a graphic designer, then producing some animation for the billboard poster I was commissioned to create.

This isn’t design. This isn’t useful. It’s masturbation, and it must stop.

Okay, calm down

Phew. What’s the real problem, here? The real problem is usually one of a “designer” being pulled out of their ability zone. I touched on this in From the gut:

Suddenly, I’m a sales and business development advisor, and friends, I suck at sales and business development.

To couch that in this context, in that situation I’m suddenly a business development artist. I’m saying or doing things that feel right, but which may or may not have any basis in reality.

Such is the fate of the graphic designer who says—or who is volunteered into saying—that they can produce web design.

The thinking is usually “I can draw pictures—how hard can it be?”.

If you agree with that, ask yourself if you’d be happy employing a cashier as your accountant. They “work with numbers”, so how hard can it be?

The tax man tends to frown on “artistic” accountancy.

So you’re saying that design is hard, art is easy?

Not at all—I’m saying they’re utterly different beasts, and to ignore that is to diminish both.

I said before that art was design without the accountability, implying that art is design where the only person you have to please is yourself. That’s true, but if you think that makes it easier, ask yourself how easy, quick and painless your last blog redesign was, or how far through that novel you are.

Art is hard. Art is very hard, because everyone’s toughest audience is themselves.

Design is easy: all we have to do is what the client asks. Regardless of how much better it would look if we could ignore the constraints of the medium.

I’m 30, and I find minimalism in most things very calming. I like tidy desks, obsess over tidy discs, find peace in ordered minds and making invisible the repetitive.

I even subscribe to Minimal Mac, and used to read Zen Habits religiously.

And yet, my house is full of crap. Full of it. Everywhere I look, my house has stuff in it that I don’t use, don’t need, and actually, when I think about it, don’t even want.

I like the idea of a bookcase full of books, but really, what’s the point? I don’t use books as reference any more, and the ones that I do use that way are all duplicated as PDFs in the cloud.

Similarly, I have a load of DVDs. How many do I really want immediate access to? More to the point, how many can I realistically watch at any one time?

When all you have is a hammer…

I’m a web developer, which is to say I’m a software engineer of sorts, which is to say that I take information retrieval problems, and couch them in interfaces that are, hopefully, a joy to use.

What I have here is a retrieval problem. My house, if you like, is like a server. It stores my stuff, and I can retrieve it whenever I like. Right now, my server is full of crap. It needs cleared out. Moreover, the interface to most of my crap is even worse than the crap it’s hiding. The vast, vast majority of my stuff exists piled, randomly, in boxes and cupboards.

In terms of any sort of information architecture, my house is the equivalent of a bad Infocom-knockoff adventure game. Do I know where that power brick for my old router is? Sure, it’s in the box in the cupboard in the hall, under three other boxes and behind the stepladder. The box itself contains maybe fifty power bricks, miles of Cat 5 string, and, if I’m honest, probably not the brick I’m after. That might be in the other box of cables in the airing cupboard in our spare room.

At this point, I’m seriously tempted to go to Maplin and just pick up a new one. But I don’t want to. I know I’ve got that power brick in here somewhere.

If everything’s special, nothing is

Why did I keep that power brick? I kept it because I hate throwing stuff out. I’m convinced I can reuse and recycle stuff, because that seems moral.

And it is, but “reuse” is an interesting term. Reusing is great, but do I have to reuse it for it to count? And look what’s happened: I have no concrete idea where that power brick is. Why? Because while I want to reuse, I have no infrastructure for managing it.

I’m kidding myself on that this is efficient.

Back to web servers: I’m sitting on a single, old, small, creaky server, and trying to run YouTube from it.

More boxes!

So, how does this problem get solved? First attempt is to organise and box the stuff all up. Hey, it worked for Google, right? More boxes!

So I get more boxes. But still, I have no plan. There’s still no interface for finding any of this junk. Do I really want to start indexing up which of 20 possible boxes my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is in?

I’m not in the business of building a stuff network. I mean, I could do it, but what’s the point?

When in doubt, buy it in

There already is a stuff retrieval network that works perfectly. I can get anything I want pretty fast, it has a search engine, a wonderful delivery network, and is reasonably priced for what I’d use it for. I’m talking, of course, about Amazon.

I can search for what I want, and it’s in my hands in 24 hours. Why am I storing all my DVDs? Let Amazon’s warehouses store them, then I can just pay the £5 “retrieval” fee when I want to watch a movie. It takes a little bit of planning, yes, but when you’re a dad, everything takes a little bit of planning, so I can live with that.

Where I really want to watch a movie or listen to music right now, I’ve got spotify and iTunes. Everything else? Amazon’s probably got me covered.

Bu-WHU?

“But wait!”, you say, “you said you wanted to get rid of stuff! How does this help?”

Cool your boots, man: this is only half of the solution. The other half? Gumtree or, if you prefer, eBay. Once I’m done with that DVD? I sell it. In effect, I’m just putting it “back” into storage, and what’s better is I get paid to do it!

Let’s get concrete again:

• I buy a DVD from Amazon for £10
• I watch it, enjoy it, and put it on Gumtree for a week at £8 (along with a batch of others to sweeten the deal, say)
• If I sell it, I’ve spent £2 “renting” the DVD. If I want to watch it again, wash rinse repeat, except this time, I maybe get it second hand for £5.

So far, I’m out £7 on a £10 DVD. And if I flog it again for £2 (say to a second hand store, again with a batch of them), I’m only out £5.

At that point, the question is “Why even buy? Why not just rent?”. Now we’re getting somewhere.

There’s a whole network of storage systems for my stuff: Libraries, LoveFilm, City Car Club. Hell, why do I own a DSLR? I should rent one when I need it. Same with lenses.

For the stuff I can’t rent? Say that powerbrick? Why the hell am I keeping it? Why isn’t it being recycled?

So what’s the next step?

Right now, everything I own is for sale. I’m probably going to lob a page up here of stuff I actually want to shift, but seriously, I don’t actually own anything any more. It’s all yours: I’m just storing it for you.

If you want to know the retrieval fee, just ask me.

I’m not sure I’ve ever known my gut to be wrong. In the past seven years, whenever anything has gone wrong, I can look back at a comment made to a friend or colleague saying, in effect, “I have a bad feeling about this”.

And I’m not just a scattergun pessimist. I know when I’m naysaying for the sake of it, and that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about that moment when you walk into the first client meeting, and something about the client, or the project, or the atmosphere in the room creeps you out. Or the way you find yourself sitting, uncomfortable, fidgety, looking for an excuse to get out, to leave, or to kill the meeting dead as fast as possible so you can get your team in a room and say “guys, really? We think this has an end?”

We’ve all had those moments, but we ignore them. “Be professional”, we tell ourselves, and then what do we do? We throw professionalism out the window and ignore what it is we’re selling in the first place: our skills and talents.

My gut knows a lot. It can pick up a lot of undercurrents and misgivings, a lot of warning signals that I’m too polite to admit to. And you know what, in a lot of cases, those misgivings aren’t about the client, they’re about me. My gut isn’t saying “this is a bad situation”, it’s saying “this isn’t a good fit”. It’s warning me about overpromising myself, or about taking on more than I can handle.

And in every one of those cases, it’s been right.

These cases aren’t just about not being “good enough”, either. Most of the time, it’s much more subtle: my gut most often warns me when a client is outwardly asking me to do one job, but implicitly requires me to do another job, which is far from my pool of talents.

Abstract sucks, let’s get concrete with a simple example:

Client asks me to produce a shopping cart, my mind applies itself, examines the technical issues, and it seems simple enough to handle. No big deal. Complex, yes, but doable, technically. Still, my gut is nagging at me, telling me something’s wrong.

What’s wrong? I’m up to the project, I’ve built similar apps before, why is this one tripping my early warning system?

Turns out the client didn’t really understand WHY they wanted the cart they asked for, and that, really, their business model isn’t really up to online sales. Suddenly, I’m a sales and business development advisor, and friends, I suck at sales and business development. The client’s getting frustrated at my lack of “web development” talent (remember, they don’t actually realise they’re asking me to do the wrong job), and I’m getting frustrated that they keep changing spec.

Looking at that initial meeting, I can see all the assumptions being made on both sides of the table, and my gut was well aware of them.

Further down the line, I end up backing out of the project, scars on all sides, and everyone’s wondering what went wrong.

What went wrong? I ignored my gut.

You do that at your peril.