Today, I am very happy to publish the interview with Catherine Bartlett, the only female developer participating in my series of developer interviews. I had the pleasure working with Cath  in sunny Barcelona. She is originally from Florida but has lived in Spain for many years now. With over 20 years of experience, I was able to learn a lot from her.

Please read below her answers!

Name: Catherine Bartlett

Bio: 16 years developing software then 5 as manager.

Specialities: streamlining, simplificiation, getting rid of fluff, psychology of development

Question 1 (Colin Brown): Over the past 2 years mobile web browsing has become far more common and accessible, gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone has helped to raise the bar in this field. How important do you think developing websites for this medium is? Should mobile browsers, such as Mobile Safari be one of the web browsers we build websites to comply with?

Cath: I don’t know.  I can’t decide if mobile browsers are all that important (even though it certainly seems to be the trend) simply because I think we are on the verge of input overload already.  Also, I think that as people who work in the technical field, we have an exaggerated idea of how other people live.  There is an enormous segment of the population that doesn’t use the internet on a mobile device even if they have and use a device capable of connecting.

Question 2 (Crawford Tait): Will increasingly-sophisticated javascript applications make flash redundant?

Cath: I sure hope so and i’ll bet you do too.

Question 3 (Diego Campo): Have you thought of changing your career during the last year? If so, which one?

Cath: I think about it every time I get pissed off but I continue to fail to find a career that I think would be more appropriate.

Question 4 (Colin McMillan): As a developer you need to keep on top of emerging technology.  Given that there aren’t enough hours in the day, how do you decide what technologies or languages to pursue?

Cath: My first response is “instinct” but we all know that that can be explained as a conglomeration of little signals that we receive and process without even realizing it.  To give a really good answer I’d need to analyze that and I don’t have time right now.

Question 5 (David Poblador): How has open-source/free software changed the way you develop software?

Cath: “Back in the day” languages and tools were part of a homogeneous environment.  Now we can and have to mix and match.  That gives us great freedom but also is a pain in the neck compared to how things used to be.

Now I don’t write much software because most of what I need already exists.  I think cars have changed the same way.  Car manufacturers used to make their own parts.  A VW had a VW transmission, for example.  The people who designed the cars undoubtedly determined the technical specs for the parts.  Now parts are mixed and matched from all over – someone who designs cars for Ford decides whether or not to use a particular model of a Mitsubishi transmission that comes close to the correct spec, for example.  So it’s more like meta-design now – simpler and at the same time more complicated.  The world of open-source/free  software has gone through more or less the same transition.  The nature of problems that one can encounter is different.

Question 6 (Kilian Valkhof): What do you strive for most in your code?

Cath: Elegance and reliability, of course.  Also to use whatever tool or code i’m using to the maximum of its capability – to find that obscure function that lets you abstract something, etc.

Question 7 (Catherine Bartlett): Tell me about the best developer you’ve ever known.

Cath: No names but his code was art.  You looked at it and understood it perfectly and knew that you never would have thought of that.  It was clean, elegant, and used available tools in ways that were shockingly good – that maybe even the authors hadn’t thought of.

Question 8 (the contributer would like to remain anonymous): How much of your work time do you spend analysing defect reports so that future instances of the same defects may be mitigated, or altogether removed from future builds?

Cath: None.  I’m too bombarded by today to try to anticipate the future.  In my opinion, the solution is to write tests for every feature and defect that is coded and those tests will protect against future instances of the same defect.  My team isn’t there yet but we’re moving toward it.

Question 9 (Alan Graham): We are bombarded every day with new approaches, new libraries (Prototype.js vs jQuery, Java vs .NET, PHP vs everything), new free services (Google Analytics vs ???).  What criteria do you use to quickly decide what to use?

Cath: Same answer as for Question 4

Question 10 (Richard Kelly – fellow online marketing dude): How much of a pain do you find developing and re-developing code for SEO?

Cath: It’s a pain.  Seems like if things keep going the way they are, that something will have to change as far as SEO is concerned, but I certainly can’t predict how.

Question 11 (Felicitas Betzl): Having worked in a variety of agencies I’ve seen major collisions between account/project managers and developers for a variety of reasons. Can you think of 5 tips you can give account and project managers, which you think would make developers lives easier?

Cath:

1. Speak directly and clearly and imagine that developers listen in 1’s and 0’s (yes and no).
2. Explain the problem you want to solve instead of (or in addition to) the solution you are asking for – there is often an easier way that will cost less.
3. Take an “agile product owner” class.  This is not a RTFM comment.  It is actually quite eye-opening.
4. Remember that developers have to treat all cases equally – if 99% of the time the feature should work one way and 1% of the time the feature should work another way, although that makes a difference for humans, it does not for machines.  Developers have to program every case correctly, which usually costs exactly the same.  This leads to the following entry…
5. Try to eliminate the special cases that don’t do a lot for the user but cost a lot to develop.

Question 12 (just for fun):  What is your favourite cartoon character?

Cath: Yikes.  I grew up with no TV – can’t answer this one.

Thank you so much for taking part in the interview, Cath! I hope we get to work together again sometime in the future!

written by Feli \\ tags: catherine bartlett, developers, programmers, web developers