This is Garrett Murray's Maniacal Rage

Anonymous asked:

Do you think you are an anomaly? Seriously — most people who are designers are not good at developing, or vice versa. But you seem to be not only good at design, but a pretty damn good developer — I know you have worked with PHP, Ruby, and now Objective-C and iPhone dev. How do you do all of this?

Anomaly is a strong word—there are a lot of people who both design and develop. While I consider myself more a developer, I do enjoy designing for the most part and I’m lucky enough to be decent at it. But I could never go head-to-head with an actual designer.

Development, however, I’ve always found much easier to get into. You learn the language, you learn the tools, and you’re off to the races. You can be very creative with it, but I rarely have that stall moment at the beginning of the project where I have NO IDEA where to start. I feel like that all the time when I open Photoshop. Development is much more comfortable for me.

As far as languages go, in my storied career to date I have written PHP, ASP 2.0, ColdFusion (haha, remember CF??), Ruby, Rails, and Objective-C. Of course, there’s also HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, etc. As far as HOW I’ve done all of it… I’m not sure. I play around a lot. I see something new, I immediately start messing around with it. I’ve learned a lot of these languages out of professional necessity as well. ASP and ColdFusion came from jobs early last decade. PHP in the late 90s because I wanted to build a better personal website. Rails (and therefore Ruby) because it was loads of fun and everyone was doing it. Objective-C so that I could build applications I wanted (like xPad and Ego), and eventually so I could make a solid living from building fun applications for an awesome platform. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.