Creative Collaboration
Building Web Apps Together

http://flickr.com/photos/plasticbag/1433992984/

www.flickr.com

<geek>

The team
Andrew Bowden – Client-side Developer
Andrew Webb – Picture Editor
Andy Harris – Client-side Developer
Annabel Else – Producer/Project Manager
Carol Patten – Homepage Designer
Caroline Smith – User Experience Designer
Christina Nsamba – Project Manager
Gee-Kay Wong – Usability Manager
Gideon Bullock – Senior User Experience Designer
Jonathan Kingsbury – Head of Editorial Affairs
Julie Dodd – User Experience Designer
Mark Hewis – Development Team Leader
Paul Hammond – Senior Client-side Developer
Steve Hunt – Information Architect
Steve Rogers – Head of Design and Navigation
Tim Noble – Senior Operations Co-ordinator
Tony Ageh – Head of Search, Listings and Core Web
Venus Speedwell – Homepage Manager
Victoria Conlan – Perl Developer
Zoe Davenport – Homepage Designer

http://flickr.com/photos/straup/542624102/

Designer Developer

DOPPLR

Design Husband

Live testing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmartin/32010732/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmartin/32010732/
Sculpting, not painting

Simon Willison

• Currently: freelance developer and consultant
focusing on JavaScript, OpenID and Django
• Previously:
• Small Yahoo! team building prototypes
• The Lawrence Journal-World newspaper
• My visual design skills suck, but I’m competent at
numerous other design disciplines

Lawrence Journal-World
• Local newspaper for a small town in Kansas
• Two developers, one designer (doubling as
HTML and CSS engineer), a bunch of editorial
staff
• Several award winning websites
• “Web development on journalism deadlines”
• We originally built Django to support the
demands of that environment

A parallel workflow with Django
• Developers design the underlying data model
• Automated admin interface allows content
producers to start entering data straight away
• Meanwhile, developers are building the logic for
the public facing pages
• Developers hand stub templates to designer
(friendly template language)
• This works great for sites that are defined by
their data

Today...
• More of my work involves applications
• Continuing collaboration with a designer is
essential right from the start
• I need a “design husband” for my personal
projects

DAVE SHEA

DAVE SHEA

DESIGNER

DESIGNER WHO CODES

INDEPENDENT

BASIC COLLABORATION
!

BASIC COLLABORATION
!
!
!

INVOLVED COLLABORATION
!
!
!

George!

Iʼve worked at Flickr
since it was born
on February 10, 2004

Paper & whiteboard

Hats
interface designer
visual designer
copywriter
project manager
product manager
program manager
community wrangler
customer care provider
information architect
webmonkey etc

The core dev team has
grown from 3 (5) to 16 (40)

The core dev team has
grown from 3 (5) to 16 (40)
(With a supporting cast of well over 100 people)

There are well over
2.3 billion photos

There are well over
2.3 billion photos
(This still freaks me out.)

Our membership has
grown to 20 million

Our membership has
grown to 20 million
(YAY! But, how does that change things?)

Whatʼs happened to
release early, release often?

Q&A
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamperegrino/250854500/