It’s not your technical ability.  That’s a given, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this job would you?

It’s not finding a push-over client.  The client is busy and has their own problems to solve.  

It’s a combination of organisation, management and communication.  

Stay organised.  Always know what is outstanding, who is doing it and when it will be done.  

Manage your client.  Software projects are strange in that so much of the process is intangible until final delivery.  So manage your client.  Guide them to where you need them to be.  Make it easier for them to be a good client than a bad one.  It won’t always work - sometimes there are clients who simply don’t fit - but for the most part it’s your job to keep them on the straight and narrow.  

Talk to them.  Always keep them up to date.  Respond to questions as quickly as possible - at least within a day.  Even if the answer is “I’m a bit busy at the moment but I’ll get back to you before the end of the week”.  With all these intangibles flying around the client looks to you to keep them grounded.  

A perfect example of this is a recent job I have been working on.  My client was a marketing agency.  Their client was a small business - we mainly dealt with the MD and Head of Marketing.  There was also a couple of people from an SEO involved.  

For some reason every job I did for them seemed to take a lot longer than the estimate.  I got the feeling that, despite the eventual, fantastic, results, there was a lingering undercurrent.  So I persuaded them to organise the project through good old Basecamp.  

And the reasons for the delays became immediately apparent to everyone, from the SEOs to the MD.  What would start out as 8 To-Do items assigned to me quickly became 30-odd To-Do items, assigned to everyone else involved - as questions were raised, slight changes in direction were needed and designs were reworked.  

With all this stuff out in the open the next phase of the project went much more smoothly than the earlier ones - because I managed the client into organising things through a better channel for communication.  

Because, the way I look at it is, at the end of the day, it’s your job, your client and your responsibility to keep things ticking over.  Don’t you think?  

It was the 2nd Leeds Ruby Thing last night and a great time was had again. A smaller turnout than last time but some of the highlights included:

• Jamie from Engine Yard in a Brightbox t-shirt
• Dom discussing the pain that the Northcrew feel about Tom Smith’s “Northpack must die” article
• The trouble with smoking crack (it’s very moreish)
• Paul’s plans to quit his day job and join the ranks of the mercenary freelancers

And myself and James talking about philosophy. In particular how Wittgenstein and Nietsche were idiots and Descartes was the greatest ever.

Mainly because Descartes signed up for the army, in order to see the world. He then proceeded to spend the vast majority of his time laid up in bed. That’s how to be a soldier!

But also because of his solution to the “Mind-Body Problem”.

For those that don’t know, the Mind-Body Problem is an intractable one. Our senses lie to us. That is apparent. I thought I saw a person out of the corner of our eye but it was actually a tree stump. You misheard what I said. The water feels cold to this hand and hot to the other hand.

Thinking this through to its logical conclusion (as philosophers tend to) this means that actually, you can’t really trust anything your senses tell you. How do you know that you are not a brain in a jar, being fed false sense data continuously by some evil demon? Logically, there is no way of knowing. So Rene concludes his treatise by saying that the solution to the Mind-Body Problem is to have faith in God, for God is good and would not consistently lie to us.

This is also why Science is wrong. Science depends upon inductive logic. The “Scientific Method”, at its core, is about repeatability. If you repeat an experiment with identical conditions then the same outcome will occur. It takes hypotheses and proves them through consensus. This is not logically consistent. What if the demon is feeding you false sense data? You think the scales read 15g but actually you are weighing a three ton elephant? Just because yesterday the three ton elephant read 15g, and Dave in Hawaii weighed his three ton elephant and reads 15g doesn’t alter the reality that you were both weighing a 3 ton elephant.

You see, ultimately, science relies on faith too. Faith that what happened yesterday, in the absence of any other change, will happen again tomorrow. That is experential, not logical.

Logically, science is wrong.