edenspiekermann_ Harry Keller

A quick note before we start: This blogpost complements our job opening in which we are looking for front end developers to work with us on ongoing and future projects. I have the impression that Edenspiekermann is mostly seen as a design agency and not as a happy place for developers – so I decided to give some background on everyday work from a developer’s perspective.

It was January 2011 when I came to Edenspiekermann’s Berlin office as a webteam intern, followed by a period as a freelance developer I am now employed full time. I am 24 years old and I have a B.Sc. in computer science & media from BHT Berlin. Front end web development is my profession and I strive to deliver semantic markup, to-the-point CSS in conjunction with snappy performance to guarantee a top-notch user experience. I love gadgets, enjoy trying something new every day and playing with the latest technologies. Edenspiekermann gives me room to do just that, in a friendly environment, with awesome clients and inspiring colleagues working on small and large projects. In the past 1.4 years I have written thousands of lines of markup and stylesheets, several jQuery plugins, a chrome extension, a windows screensaver (duh!), very little PHP, lots of Ruby with Padrino/Rails and countless lines of JavaScript/CoffeeScript. At Edenspiekermann we like to dive into modern web technology. We use Haml for markup, Sass for CSS and develop mostly in Ruby as a server side language. We are not fixed on these tools though, they just represent our status quo – every single member of the team can introduce a new technology or framework and if it is better suited to get the job done, we will go ahead and use it.

Let me give you an example: When Lukas Hodel joined us earlier this year and suggested to use backbone.js for a major project (sorry, NDA forbids any details) we gave it a spin and it turned out to be the perfect choice. A different client needed to use Django as a CMS and we are happily coding python based front end code for weeks now. As a developer you are involved in these choices and you can really make a difference and move the team forward, every single day.

Our development team consists of roughly 7 people, namely Moritz Guth, Lukas Hodel, Jonathan Krause, Dirk Schmid, Eike Send, Oliver Zeyen and myself. You can hit any of us by mail or Twitter and ask us about our work, if you happen to have questions before applying for a job. We are always looking for like-minded people and if you are such a person, you can start working with us as early as next week.

Still sceptical? Let me tell you about our workflow and the relation with our designers. A common misconception is the pixel-perfect mentality … you know the dilemma: A designer comes up with a heavily complicated mess of boxes and colors, sends the Photoshop file over to you and expects you to code it pixel-perfect. Well, not in our case. Our interaction designers know what they are doing and they do not force you to use JS to vertically center some text in IE7. Quite the opposite actually – most of our designers know how to code themselves and what they come up with is always clever and thought-through. Of course they push your abilities, but otherwise it would be boring, right?

Still not convinced? How about this run-down:

We have left IE7 behind and are rapidly abandoning full support for IE8 as well. No round corners? Well, we do not think elements need to look exactly the same in all browsers. We like to move forward and let things degrade gracefully, instead of forcing dozens of polyfills into the code.

Our websites are responsive by default. If you agree with us that responsive webdesign combined with a mobile-first approach is the only viable solution to a increasing mess of internet capable devices, then we are talking along the same lines.

More and more of our projects are managed with Scrum methodologies. Scrum was invented in a coding environment, so the agile workflow that comes with it is natural for developers.

We work in teams where people can benefit and learn from each other … developers need like-minded people to stay on top of their game and that is exactly what is happening for me every day.

At Edenspiekermann we do not take job titles too seriously … you got viable skills besides coding? Bring them in! Are you good at social media? There is concept and strategy work to be done! Do you like to design something visual once in a while? Besides programming I have also created presentations and interfaces. Do you enjoy writing sentences as well, not just code? This blog is your stage. Basically: If you are good at something that is related to our work you will be able to make it flourish.

If you decided to join us, you would work on small to large scale websites and applications (both web and native) as well as building prototypes. That includes architecting and engineering the structure, deciding on the right tools, taking care of the presentation and wrapping it up with behaviour in JavaScript. Of course we do not expect you to be perfect in all of these fields, but it gives you a sense of scope. You will definitely not be the code monkey sitting in the basement optimizing for IE7. Quite to the contrary.

To draw a conclusion: Joining Edenspiekermann was a decision I certainly do not regret … the past months have been a hell of a ride; I have met so many inspiring people, tried countless new technologies, learned so many things and helped to produce products I can be proud of. If that sounds like your thing, come join us by contacting us on Twitter or dropping us an email. We would love to work with you and build awesome stuff.

Von abgeknickten Wahrzeichen, Megaman-Flashbacks, geköpften USB-Sticks sowie Warteschlangen vor Herrentoiletten: die O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Berlin. Spannende Vorträge gab es natürlich auch.

Auch wenn das Logo anderes vermuten lässt: Der Berliner Fernsehturm steht noch – und unweit entfernt fand diese Woche die O’Reilly Velocity Conference statt, zum ersten Mal in europäischen Gefilden. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Zusammenkommen von Web-Performance-Spezialisten, folglich Technologiebegeisterten, deren Mission es ist, das World Wide Web schneller und effizienter zu gestalten. Eine derartig spezialisierte und mit internationalem Wissen geflutete Konferenz lässt sich Edenspiekermann natürlich nicht entgehen – zumal, wenn sie direkt vor der Bürotür stattfindet. Ergo kurzerhand Oliver Zeyen und meine Wenigkeit geschickt, um Erkenntnisse und Wissen zu sammeln. Es sollte sich lohnen.

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Building websites for mobile devices is on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days and for good reason: The smartphone market is seeing an enormous growth and people love using their shiny new devices to browse the web.

Most websites we build at Edenspiekermann take this shift to mobile into account by serving a visually optimized version of the page to smartphones. The technique behind this is called “media queries” or “responsive design”. In a nutshell: Different styling rules apply depending on the size of the user’s screen – thus the site presents itself differently on a big desktop display and on a small mobile screen.  

However, in a recent project for Red Bull we had the opportunity to build a mobile webapp. This term refers to a website that is mobile only and has no desktop counterpart. Therefore it can make better use of the features unique to mobile devices. More information on this particular project is available in our blog post about the “Daily Note”.

It doesn’t stop there, though: We wanted to share this freshly gained knowledge, so I held a talk at the Berlin based usergroup up.front on November 8th about the lessons we learned during the development of the webapp. The talk was not very specific to the project itself and ended up being a compilation of advice I would give to beginners starting with mobile webapp development.

Some of the core topics were mobile browser market share, the use of special iOS tags (when making your website webapp ready), as well as hints regarding performance, loading time and how to handle different screen sizes. You can find the slides on Speaker Deck: Webapp development – 10 lessons learned

If webapps are not really your thing and you are more interested in responsive design, I can highly recommend reading this book: A Book Apart – Responsive Web Design; it’s a fantastic round-up on the topic. More information on mobile website performance can also be found in this outstanding article by David Calhoun.