After being somewhat of a nomad and finishing up a year contract with Verizon as Chief Strategist, Emerging Technologies I decided to get back into the job market and really focus on a career and position I can see myself at long term.

I entered the job market with a polished resume and a high level of confidence. I’ve always been very passionate about user experience and even started a startup around personalized user experiences so I targeted my job search to that. The job search started out well and got into many job interviews though kept on being told I was over qualified. After a month of rejection after rejection I finally found myself very close to a job I was excited about. It was VP, User Experience for Nokia. I made it through all their long interview processes that lasted weeks and had my final interview with the entire design team. I gave a presentation, knocked everyone’s socks off and left feeling confident. I was a shoe in for sure! Then got the call… pause… heart pacing… and I was rejected. Ouch! I was told my experience was “too technical.” Another heartbreak was for CTO for Bebo which I got to the last interview and was told my experience was “too corporate.” Majority of my interviews went great, everyone was excited, then at the end was rejected because I was “over qualified.” This I’ll never get. I was so frustrated that I started to give up and figured I’ll just get an Engineering job since I could always get those easily. The experience was the same. Over qualified. Frustrated again.

I stopped looking for a week after the rejections were too hard to deal with and having to adjust to my broken ego. It’s always hard to look for a new job while you have a job since looking for a new job is a FULL TIME job.

I decided to turn my 4 page wordy resume into a small 2 page snapshot with catchy one liners. OMG that worked. Suddenly I found myself interviewing with jobs and companies that were more inline with my experience and what I was looking for.

After two months of interviewing I was fortunate enough to land several job offers. I had competing job offers from large fortune 500 companies and small digital agencies. After having 30+ rejections and 17 active interviews (4 soft offers, 6 hard offers)I narrowed my top choices to:

• Director, Global Content Strategy (social media) with Walmart in Bentonville, AK.
• CTO with Rakuten in Boston, MA.
• CTO with Flint in New York, NY.
• Sr. VP, User Experience, Rosetta in Cleveland, OH.

Since I was looking to plant my roots deep into my next job I seriously weighed the pros and cons into a list of 20 factors. My Interest, Ashley (my dog), people in the company, the team, collaboration, work environment, health benefits, salary, industry impact, industry networking, job growth, city: coolness, city: cost of living, city: making friends, commute, learn from, job skills, perform happy, job security, other.

Even though I wanted to stay away from corporate america and the fact that Walmart was in Bentonville, AK (not a big city) my ego wanted that bragging rights of being a Global Director at the largest company in the world. I knew that I shouldn’t let my ego get the best of me. It hard to do some serious soul searching to make myself not take the Walmart offer. Then it came down to Rakuten, Rosetta, and Flint which all where executive jobs. I was VERY impressed with the Flint team when I interviewed with them in person and was excited about their collective experience and passions though Flint was paying almost $100k a year LESS than the other jobs which meant I would take a SERIOUS pay cut. I stopped considering Flint then put my focus on Rakuten and Rosetta. The executive Rakuten team was impressive and so was the team of developers. Throughout my career I always felt like I was pigeon holed into just “technical” which this job with Rakuten would have been so I then moved onto Rosetta. Interviewing with Rosetta it was the classic case of big agency and I could tell my position would have been in the middle of tons of internal politics since I was told other VPs were passed up for the role.

So now I had to choose. Flint New York (who I was referred to by recruiter rock start John Artz) was my top choice simply because of the team. Those who know me well know that I think it’s the team that makes a company successful. The Flint team seemed to be genuine and passionate about their roles which was very refreshing. I was still struggling with the major pay cut I would have to take to work at Flint. I reached out to my close friends and had mix opinons. After my divorce I got a tattoo that says “On a Journey of Peace” which is a constant reminder to be a man of peace and not focused on living large and fast. I know in my core that Flint was the best choice. It was a big risk for me to work for such a small company though I knew it would was the right choice.

After moving to New York and working with Flint for 2+ months I am glad to say I made the right choice. I am constantly impressed with my coworkers.

James Summerfield (CEO) has such a driving passion to be genuine with clients and to help clients achieve top quality (vs quantity). He gives us a confidence that the respect for clients and growth of the company is his main charter. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from him.

Oscar Valdez (Creative Director) is like a magician. Recently there was this webpage that looked dull and I had doubts it would look good since the content was so minimal. In one day he worked his creative magic and when I saw the results… I hugged him.

Marissa Frydman (Production Director) is the glue that hold us together and keeps the gears in our machine run. I’m impressed with her ability to plan and execute a project from beginning to end and having a deep understanding of each component of a project. She sees the talent in each of us, some talents we may not even see in ourselves.

Christina Summerfield (Client Services) brings a sense of care and warmth to the company. She understands our clients to the core and helps us shape our relationship with our clients to be personal and genuine.

Jessica Spraos (Strategy). I’m most impressed with Jessica. She has a contagious passion to learn from the team and has a high integrity for our clients and the work we product. She’s a young spirt with an old soul.

I love my job as it’s very strategic and big picture thinking. Those who know me well know that I’ve always been on the cutting edge of technology and to work at a company that thrives on the cutting edge is a perfect fit. I love how we sit in a room and brainstorm and strategize, feeding off of each other’s talents. I also feel flattered that everyone has a high value on my opinions and feedback. It’s great to work with a team where we ALL have respect each other.

Just like a movie that has great casting, I feel that way about Flint. We all have a perfect chemistry that makes us a well oiled machine. With that analogy I feel like I’m a veteren actor who has been in plenty of movies, some big blockbusters and some indie films and my role with Flint is a movie that has a compelling script, great fellow actors, and we are all confident that we are in an Oscar winning film that will define our legacy as actors.

I also love how I found an awesome apartment close to work so I could easily bring Ashley to work. Everyone at work loves Ashley. :)

To summarize those who are looking for new jobs my advice would be to make that choice that is inline with what you’re most passionate about and to work it a team that shares that passion. Your career should NOT be about money, title, or position. it should be about what makes you happy. If you can find a job that makes you enjoy and get paid for it… what a wonderful life that would be.

I’m grateful that I’ve found mine.

Throughout my 17 year career in web technology, I have helped build over 700 websites/applications and worked on over 300 web projects and just about all needed to be built from scratch or rebuild to scale with growth in traffic and users. This post is to breakdown my recommended approach for building out a new website that will grow and most importantly how to control the costs with the growth.

Building a web site/application is similar to building a house or a car. There are many ways to build from low cost to luxury.  Similar to a car, a Ford Focus is cheaper that a Lexus because of the materials and efforts into the quality of design and features. The major difference in regards to web, is the true value of a website is the DATA. Let’s take Facebook for examples. The Facebook website itself has many cool features, status updates, photos, wall posts, video, games, apps… though the true value is the data the Facebook holds. Regardless of how BIG and grandiose an idea is regarding a website, the need to build a super robust high-end website from stage 1 is not necessary. Facebook has a $16 billion valuation primarily due to the data it has on it’s 800,000 million users. When Facebook first launched it was a small low budget website and the technology and backend architecture grew as the need grew to support the growth in users and data.

In regards to open source development platforms (CMS platforms) Drupal takes the reign though the cost to develop a website is higher than most which is mostly due to the high costs of the required network infrastructure and technical resources. MindTouch is another good CMS to build on though has a (low) monthly cost. If Drupal was a car it would be an Escalade ($65,000), very robust though high cost to maintain. Then there is the Ford Focus ($17,600) where it’s a standard car that gets you from point A to point B with a low cost to maintain and low cost to drive. Regardless of which car you drive, an Escalade or a Ford Focus the person who is driving the car is the same. The person is the website “data.” The more people in the car, the biggest car you’ll need. When you first launch a website, you do not need a super robust infrastructure, what you need is a super robust architecture plan in regards to how the data and network will scale.

To better explain this analogy, lets say you are going on a road trip from California to New York. You know that you’ll start off your trip with just yourself and throughout the journey you’ll be picking up passengers. Also you’re not sure yet that you’ll even make it to New York, all you know is that you want to go on a road trip. Since you’re not 100% sure of how many passengers you’ll have by the time you get to New York, you might just pick up 2 passengers or 100 passengers. Would you start off your trip with a mega bus or a standard sedan? In this analogy the cars are rentals, so you can always swap out the size/make of cars throughout the trip to support the amount of people in the car. With the analogy regardless of what car you start off with, regardless of where you end up, the passengers are the same, just the car itself has changed. This is the SAME for the backend technology that supports the data that your website is built upon. As your website grows and changes so can the technology that supports it, while the data (the passengers) that your website is run on remains the same.

To successfully do this you’ll need a good architectural plan from the beginning. Many technical professionals are so adamant and stubborn on building super duper high scalability mega expensive solutions from the beginning mostly because that is all they see and all they know. Most technical professionals only focus on the end and never really understand the journey to get there. If they were spending money from their own pocket, I can guarantee you that they ALL will be singing a different tune. When it comes to building out any website there are many ways to build and many different disciples though the goal for a financial ROI is the same.

Ok now let’s talk about how we can do this is open source technologies that exist today. While I suggested earlier that Drupal and MindTouch is a good choices, it is not the choice to start off with to keep initial costs low and manageable. I would highly recommend Wordpress as a CMS platform to build upon. Wordpress is widely used throughout the internet (60+ million websites use Wordpress). Although Wordpress is considered a “blog” platform, many people are using it as a CMS solution as well. Like Drupal, Wordpress has the ability to manage users, manage content, is scalable, can support a high volume of traffic, can easily design a template, and most importantly has a module API so you can build add-on features and build in custom functionality.

When it comes to building a website/web application, here are the general items needed from a technology perspective. The cost of each item can be controlled depending on the initial and overall requirements of each item.

• Detailed Plan: Architecture / infrastructure / network
• Detailed Plan: Management of content / data / assets
• Technology platform
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Backend programming (recommend PHP)
• Front-end programming (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
• Database (recommend MySQL)
• Hosting (web servers for content, data, media)
• Bandwidth (traffic)
• Design (template)
• Mobile
• List of any 3rd party tools / applications
• Development environments (development, staging, production)
• Development processes (backups, source control, etc)
• Monitoring Tools (uptime, statistics, backups, etc)

In summary, I would start by building out a website on Wordpress and each custom feature would be “plug-in” and as the website grows migrate to Drupal and convert each Wordpress plug-in to a Drupal “module”. Both platforms are PHP so just as long as the programming and database transition was planned ahead before the initial development, then converting a Wordpress plug-in into a Drupal module should be simple.

Talking this approach will keep the initial cost low and better help you scale the technology with the growth of the website.

I’m often asked what web technology would I use for a client (or new project). While I have my personal choice on a technology this is not an easy to answer question.

The “technology” should be based on the client’s needs, future plans (for technology), and most importantly budget. Choosing the technology should NEVER… I repeat should NEVER be what you personally think is “cool” and hip. Beware of anyone that gives an answer before understanding the client’s needs and detailed requirements.

Example: I love pizza… no seriously I lo-lo-love pizza. Now if someone asks me “what should I eat for lunch”… I would ask (or take into consideration) if they are a vegetarian, what do they usually like, are they on a diet, what is their budget, etc.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the popular programming languages (excluding front-end languages i.e. html, css, javascript, etc)

PHP (an open-source language)

• PRO: Free free free.
• PRO: Tons of open-source applications and platforms that can easily be used for rapid application development
• CON: Not really an enterprise scale language though does have the ability with minor/major tweeks to the core PHP processor.
• CON: Most PHP “developers” are script developers rather than high end application developers
• CON: Knowing from personal experience as a hiring manager… San Diego is VERY dry for finding good PHP developers.

.NET / ASP (a Microsoft language)

• PRO: Easily integration into corporate/enterprise systems
• PRO: Can scale (if developed correctly)
• PRO: Lots of development tools, QA tools, and replication systems
• PRO: Can easily integrate with SQL Server (both were made hand-in-hand)
• CON: Costly (money and software/hardware resources)
• CON: Most “.Net Developers” are pre-madonna’s as most top talent .Net developers have been doing .Net for many years (ASP, ASP.NET, .NET) and feel entitled to a high salary.
• CON: Most (if not all) .Net Developers are so consumed with everything being Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft and the discussion of anything else if usually meet with closed ears and closed minds.

JAVA / J2EE (not “JavaScript”)

• PRO: One of the most widely used enterprise languages
• PRO: Most Java Developers are good with quality code
• PRO: There’s just about nothing you can’t build with Java (now read next bullet point)
• CON: The front-end of Java is very archaic and hard to really produce good design’s (UX) in a Java environment

Other Notes

• Ruby (ruby on rails) is NOT a programming language… it’s a subset “scripting” language that really needs to run in parallel with another language (of your choice)
• “Java” is NOT “JavaScript”… they are TWO completely different languages
• “jQuery” is NOT a language… it’s a library of reusable JavaScript code (nothing more)
• Do NOT use CSS style sheets that “reset” HTML (li, tables, etc…)
• CSS should ONLY be used to format (design and layout) and NOT a replacement of HTML
• XHTML is NOT a replacement for  HTML… it’s simply just recommendation on how to write HTML. It’s like walking at a crosswalk (crosswalk = XHTML)… most people jaywalk (use of various HTML standards).
• Don’t believe everything you read in programming books. For example… this one JavaScript book says you have to have your <script> block above the <head> tag… soooooo not true. You could have a <script> block ANYWHERE.

Ok ok I think I covered enough for now. Still so much more to dig into… like databases, servers, source control, how to write good code, seo myths… etc. I’ll save those for late posts.