#i hate the process of putting yourself out there on the linkedin and shit

[elliegratrick-blog]

5 Guest Speakers

Al Murphy 

Al Murphy gave a light hearted and honest look at where his creative journey has taken him, showing both the high and lows. He was funny and eased my stresses about life after graduation. He reassured that we don’t need to have it all figured out in three years. It’s a constant learning process of growing and improving, building on your skills. If you do make a piece of work, in six months you’ll probably hate it! The strong message throughout his talk is to be maintain your own individuality, be yourself rather than catering to what you THINK people will like. Most of the time it will end up looking like shit! This is what he explained happened during his ‘art school wobble’, which I think all of us creatives go through at some point. The advice he gave that its ok to not know where you’re headed I think gave the room some relief. It took him 5 years to finally have the eureka moment and have confidence in his own style and perspective. Something I found useful what he said is that what YOU like drawing can be translated into a professional setting like an editorial or advertising.  This I felt was reassurance as sometimes I worry my work is too ‘weird’ looking for mainstream consumers and won’t get me hired in future. It eases these worries and affirmation I should keep drawing these bizarre looking characters and that they can work for both the personal or professional. Some of his personal work he created which was huge billboard advertisements led to him being hired to create a mural in a bar. Still doing what he loves but getting out of his space and taking a risk with these billboards expanded his creative and professional horizons.

A lot of the companies he worked with like Specsavers and Perrier I would never have thought about being involved in the creative sphere. Again, this is an affirmation that there are many jobs in the creative industry, despite what your (insert family member that hates art) might say!

Simon Spilsbury

Without saying much, Simon Spilsbury just started manically drawing to the Foo Fighters. It was quite a shock as you don’t often see many illustrators with the confidence to draw live in front of an audience. He seemed quite negative with the rhetoric of ‘young people= Instagram obsessed’. I didn’t agree with this view point, I enjoy being inspired by other creatives work from across the country and world and engaging with them, creating a positive space. I feel possibly this comes from a generational gap and traditional upbringing. From an upbringing in fine art, realistic copying transitioning into illustration later in life. This resonated with how my creative path has gone: believing ‘good art’ was how well you could replicate a photograph with oil paint transitioning to a more freeing and expressive illustrative style. He stressed how important it is to always draw. I have personally noticed this difference in my own style when I draw most days compared to when I hardly drew at all. Simon started in his first job for advertising that then led on to illustrating.What he learnt from advertising was a lesson in collaboration, a future skill necessary for all creative for working with brands, customers and art directors.

A nice way of saying it was that he was ‘honest’ about life in the creative industry. There wasn't many positives which for some may have been worrying. I also found that explaining how to draw wasn’t that relevant as many of us have our own personal voice which his instructions didn’t relate to. I needed more process/professional advice. 

I found the way he explained ideas creation interesting, I could never put it into words myself. Take one idea and feed them into something else, collisions of separate ideas. E.g a normal chair but then combine it with a frog= a froggy chair. You shouldn’t have any preconceived ideas before you start. Thinking freely means a wobby line can become a skeleton for a character which you can build the figure on top. I feel this is a useful tip as a lot of illustrators including myself overthink “is it right?”. You define it for yourself. His talk ended with a ‘rap’. I say rap lightly… maybe just keep it for Christmas when you’ve had one too many!

Lyndon Hayes

Lyndon has been our tutor this module, travelling up from London every Thursday to come chat to us and see our work. Lyndon does a lot of editorial illustrations and reportage style illustrations. He did a talk for us, explaining his work and the advice that comes from being in the industry 20 years.  He has a passion for painting (which he still does in his spare time) which is where his work started. Creating pieces on found surfaces, wood, textures anything you can find in the skips with his painted figures. Many of his paintings including ones done at a boxing club, had this exposed sections without paint, highlighting the found material’s surface texture. I found these pieces really exciting as I seem to always be drawn to texture and painting was always my first love. You can see his inspirations of Hockey in these pieces. These paintings began to catch the attention of various newspapers who wanted this painterly style in their editorials. This is what most of his portfolio consists of. His illustrations are now digitally done but still have the painterly quality. They have a bolder line and often more paired down background with a restricted colour palette.

He told us the importance of keeping drawing for yourself, in his spare time he does observational drawings around London, a more reportage style. By building up his sketchbook and regularly posting these on Instagram and his own website lead to professional work. Keeping things fresh may lead to opportunities you’d never expect.

He said there are high and lows, sometimes there is lots of commissions sometimes there are lulls. These lulls are times to maintain your own personal projects. One of the regular commissions he gets is to illustrate Observer Food Monthly where a celebrity is interviewed on their favourite place to eat. These regular jobs provide steady incomes.

It’s reassuring that there can be (some) stability in a career and some creatives’ rent money is just made up of commission work. (If you can get it!)

Kirk Brown

Kirk Brown was a recently graduated alumni of the University. Finishing his degree in graphic design only a couple of years ago. Whilst at uni, he said he entered into all the competitions he could, putting in hard work to do well both in his uni projects but other personal projects as well. He spoke of the usefulness of Linkedin in finding commissioned work whilst still studying. I’d never really thought it was for creatives, more for people in ‘business’ but it couldn’t hurt to put myself on there. If nothing comes from it, I’ve not lost out anything.  Since graduating he has gone from graphic design to being a Creative Lead at SQN: a PR, sponsorship and marketing agency in areas such as sport, technology and automotives. This didn’t happen overnight. He mentioned how he worked for a couple of years at a smaller company before moving to this larger one. He says that smaller companies there is more creative control compared to larger ones there are stricter boundaries but more budget avaliable. I wasn’t sure if this talk was going to be relevant to me however this information was useful. For example if I was hired as an inhouse illustrator depending on the company size would depend on the creative control I could utilise. Businesses that I may not ever imagine I would work for may commission work like how areas such as racing/ sports etc needs creative teams to help them!

When presenting ideas he recommends putting up a substantial amount to give clients a variety to choose from as well as a wildcard that pushes client guidelines. They may even pick it! Be precious about work as if you bodge an idea and its not so good, a client may pick it and you’ll be stuck working with it. This is something to take forward. Don’t just half arse an idea to make up the numbers. Take care and to think about what you’re coming up with.

Neil Sheakey

Neil Sheakey is a design director at Uniform  in Liverpool. It is a multidisciplinary creative agency where all work is done in house. It’s made up of a global family of diverse backgrounds. There was a lot of waffling and jargon and what I got from it is that is a PR agency that uses creative solutions, branding, design and advertising to make businesses stand out in a world that is all morphing into one. The talk lasted a long time with my back going into some other worldly pain so it was a bit difficult to concentrate in this talk. 

He spoke a lot about his life before graduating and the journey that took him to Uniform.  The creative process they use there is empathy-perspective-direction-creative-action. This means taking the time to consider clients and businesses and their perspectives. To start creative ideas the team mood board initial ideas as well as those related to the concept. The benefit of working in a team of people each with different disciplines is that they all have unique perspectives of how to tackle a project. Combining these all together creates successful pieces of work such as Mitre football designs (for what football competition? League? Game? I have no idea?). 

What he recommends for our time at university is to make the most of our time. Getting our work out there on places like Behance or even Instagram is going to benefit you. By exploring, experimenting with techniques and process at uni we can find our voice, collaborate with others and there is no pressure like you would have in an agency once you graduate. What I found the most useful piece of advice is that you need to look after yourself, be yourself and enjoy it! At the end of the day you are the most important person in your life, you won’t make your best work if you are not caring for yourself.

[standardstate-blog]

After 15 years, I still think Java has not evolved for the better. In fact I hate it now.

Yup! I said it. I really hate Java now. I mean, really.

Maybe I'm too old and completely lost the plot, maybe I am simply not relevant anymore as a developer, maybe I just "don't get it" or maybe I am a dumbass. Whatever it is, I have many issues with it now and I need to get some of that off my chest to at least have the feeling I am not crazy, or at least not so much.

Annotations.

A couple of years ago (actually more like 15), annotations were introduced and at the beginning, I though they were a great idea. I still do. Now I hate them, and that's not the language's fault. The problem is that many frameworks and tools make way too much use of them. The original idea in part was to remove a lot of boilerplate code and allow the devs to focus on what actually needed to get done. But nowadays, in many frameworks, THAT'S ALL YOU SEE!! Yep, you simply open up a class where the main function should be and all you see is 37 different annotations that invisibly define what this application does. There is one line of code in the main method, and the rest is taken on by magic by all the different annotations. Some of those scan packages for other classes that also have annotations, and so on. So instead of making the code simpler, it almost completely hides the basic structure of how the app is wired and unless you know exactly what all these annotations imply, you're pretty much stuck spending a lot of time figuring it out. None of that is more intuitive or simpler. Annotations are like a hammer, you can use it to build a house or punch yourself in the dick. The current frameworks are punching devs in the dick with annotations. Ouch ...

Masquerading as a functional language.

Face it Java, you are not the belle of the ball anymore. You are an old, verbose, bloated, object oriented ancestral language. That's it. No amount of lipstick will make that pig any more attractive. Own it.

20 years ago, object oriented programming was THE way to go as far as programming went. Everything was transitioning from older languages to the newer more maintainable (apparently, which is BS, but that's for another blog post) OOP options. At that time it made perfect sense. Internet was booming and more and more applications became web applications. We started banking online, we started using email in the browser and companies were letting go of more traditional desktop apps in favor of more modern solutions. Java and .NET were right in the center of that revolution. And it made perfect sense. Object oriented langages were so very well adapted to work with relational databases. Mapping your domain classes to the relational model was somewhat simple and intuitive. Not without its challenges, but very very adequate.

And that was absolutely fine. I coded more applications with Struts (remember the good ol' days ?) and Hibernate than I care to remember. And I had a blast, it was a great challenge and you could really leverage the power of object oriented programming. You could (when applicable) leverage many design patterns and make really elegant, testable and maintainable code. Ok, you had 1200 xml configuration files that had 5000 lines on average. That's what it was and it was an OK tradeoff, you could work with that. But that was before Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and many other web applications you probably never heard of that take in a lot of user provided data. That was before you could have millions of users hitting your app and services, before Big Data, before NoSQL's explosion, the commercial use of machine learning and AI, and the emergence of the 3 big cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Where am I going with this ? Well it's relatively simple. The market, the devs, the communities and tools started broadening their horizons and using different tools to meet the new needs. Spark was coded with Scala, Docker and Kubernetes are coded with Go and many machine learning tools and libraries are coded with Python, to only name that one. What these languages have in common is the functional component which Java does not have. And that's OK in my book. But in trying to stay relevant I guess, they added many functional aspects to the language that simply don't have their place in my opinion. It really feels like they ran out of ideas and simply want to jump on that functional hype train so they can still think it's really popular.

When I was introduced to Java, they took great pride in saying that it was a pure or exclusively object oriented language. That's what I was expecting it to remain. And I am not one of the purists that would lose their shit over the fact that it had primitives like ints, doubles, etc ...

The SDK is not enough to even get started.

This one really grinds my gears. You can't even get started coding a minimally decent application without 37 tools. Simply having the SDK installed on your workstation barely gets you out of the gate. What you need aside from that is :

A build tool

Yep, in 2019, you need to install either (from what I know, there might be more) Gradle, Maven or Ant (if you enjoy pain) if you want to build your project. Yes, you can compile with javac provided with the SDK, but that's pretty much it. You have to find some way to automate the rest of the building process, hence the use of a 3rd party tool.

A unit test framework

Yep, that as well in 2019 still slips through Java's fingers. I don't get it. Why ? Unit testing is built it in to several languages, and that has been the case for many years now. Check out this list to see what languages have built-in support for unit testing. You will notice that Go and Rust are present, along with Python.

On this one I need to be honest though, if I hadn't coded in Go for 3 years before returning to Java, I probably never would have had an issue with how it's unit tested. But then again, it's refreshing to go look elsewhere to see what other ideas people are having to realize that what you are currently using isn't the bee's knees as much as you thought. It is so much simpler to just start coding and creating your tests without having to import this and that and the other thing. All is already set up and ready. No need to modify class paths or ignore files or folders, no configuration whatsoever. I had that before, and not any more and I miss it so much.

Some kind of JSON / XML parser

You would figure that someone would have had the idea to add built-in parsing for JSON and XML by now. There are very few moments when you won't at least load some configuration in one of those 2 formats. Simplifying that would actually bring a lot of value to the developers and would save quite a lot of time.

Bloating caused by being bloated, verbose and verbose about being bloated ...

That I can say infuriates me the most. Why all this code and all those dependencies ? Why all that inexplicable bloating ?

I did a quick test with Spring Boot, which is supposed to be the standard for magnificent, quick and easily maintainable services. Like magic they said .. Well, not so much. To even get 1 endpoint that did a hello world kinda thing I needed 11 files and a little under 400 lines of code and configuration .. Almost feels like a React app o_O . And still using xml files to configure 27 million things, in 2020, is not part of the solution by any means.

And I haven't built it yet, which will probably fail and take 10 minutes .. be right back ..

Ok, so the build did not fail, but the resulting war file was a staggering 20 Megabytes. Again, for 1 endpoint that answers "Hello World". Is it just me ? Am I being a real prick ? Am I the asshole ? What bit did I not understand that makes me not think this is normal ? Plus that war file does not run independently, it needs to run in some container or server thing to be of any use to anybody. Which leads me up to my next point ...

Create actual executables already !!

One of the most amazing parts of Go is that it builds an executable that has all the dependencies included. Plain and simple. So if you are building a CLI application, simply run the executable. Same for a a REST service, simply build it with your desired options and there you have it, an executable that will run your service. No Tomcat, no Jersey thing, no additional tool required. Just run it. That not only simplifies the development process, but also the conainterizing of whatever it is you are building. With the same Go example, you can use "scratch" as a base for your container and simply copy the built binary and it will run fine, no other dependencies. This makes for very lightweight containers that build very fast.

Nobody gives a crap about the 'build once run anywhere' thing. At least I don't.

That argument is also a dead one to me. I never leveraged that in any way shape or form, ever. I never went to a colleague and said : "Thank god we can run this jar anywhere, we would have been fucked otherwise.". I just don't see why they went through all that trouble with the runtimes and the this and that.

I coded for several years with a language that had to be built for a specific platform, and it never caused any headaches. We either built with the provided switches for the target platform, or even better, on the exact Docker container in which it is intended to run. Plus, .NET only runs on Windows and it is very well adopted by a large community of developers that do wonderful things.

If you're into AI or machine learning, you most likely aren't using Java.

That's a big thing nowadays, adding AI and machine learning to whatever service you are putting out there. And if you want to leverage any of the most popular platforms or libraries, you'll have to make use of some functional language, usually Python or R. That's just how it is. Other languages than Java are far better suited for that type of computing. So even if you want to keep a Java only stack in your organization, you'll get some limitations on the type of tools you can actually integrate.

[topicprinter]

So I get asked many many times “how can I market better”.Here’s a list, in no particular order. All are important.1. Smile more.No one likes dealing or meeting or talking with a sad sack of nope. I don’t care if you had a shit night last night and argued with your other half and ended up in tears: I’m your customer and you make me feel good putting cash dough into your hands. Your other half will make up with you tonight. I won’t.2. Forget using social media for personal stuff only.Social media is evolved into an effective marketing weapon where you are the brand. Or if you work for a large company, you’re a brand ambassador whether you want that role or not. Social media is now good for showcasing you’re trustworthy and you know your shit. Facebook is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is Facebook. They’re interchangeable. Treat them that way. No one cares about your adorable kids in the weekend Park session but it does lead to trust that you’re a family man/woman. View all social media as a method of showcasing. If you want to be actually social? Go and meet someone face to face where possible. Shows you give a fuck about them.3. Get your video on.“I hate the camera”. Tough shit. Nothing ticks more boxes than appearing warts-and-all on a screen where you show people your face, your non-verbal signals you’re a top bloke/bird, that you obviously know your shit, and where you appear way more human than our carefully-curated and manicured HTML email templates.4. Get your live stream onVideo is king for cutting through the initial sales cycle bullshit of 15 emails politely skirting around the fact you want to be paid for doing a job you’re pitching for. Trouble is? How do you get an audience? You live stream your arse off. And you coat tail off bigger names without sucking their dicks too much, and interview them and ask them genuine hard questions that would be relevant AND FUCKING USEFUL to YOUR audience. Too many Gary Vee videos and motivational quotes and starry-eyes and guess what? You’re still poor. He’s minting it from your starry-eyed inaction on your own content and voice progression.5. Get equipment.People forgive shit quality video but they fucking hate bad audio. Get a good mic as much as you can afford. Use 4k30 or 4k60 recording mode now - all new smartphones have one or both of those recording modes. Bigly large files and a c*nt to edit on your shitty 6 year old laptop, but your viewers will love you and buy from you, and that’s all that counts.6. Work into the small hours and understand this isn’t hustle:This is fucking hard work and no one gives a flying fuck about your plight or your business. People care about what you can do for them. Period. Never forget that.7. Focus on low-hanging fruit wins first.Everyone wants the multimillion dollar marketing experience on their super lean budget. Fuck that. Focus on getting some sales in the door that are straightforward and easy and done via your existing network of people or clients - you could easily call every single one of your clients or send them a personal video message right now, and get a few referrals. Try it.8. Get the right tool for the right job.Doesn’t matter if it’s clickfunnels, Active Campaign or Tai Lopez’ latest marketing opus that I personally hate. The point is: You shouldn’t give a flying rats arse what I or anyone else says: Take it onboard, sure, but evaluate before handing over your dough and see how it fits in with YOUR business processes and YOUR sales funnel (or whatever the cool kids are calling them these days)9. Email is fucking shit.I don’t give a fuck who tries calling me out in this, the point is that they’re peeps already with big lists and they have that luxury of scoffing at your cute attempts to list build using tired marketing tools such as landing pages. YOU are the one that needs sales - and fast. What is more powerful out of these two: A) email drip sequence over 7 days using same wording for everyone and a shitty open rate and even worse click rate on your SUPASOARAWAYGIVEAWAYPALOOZA thing? B) a personalised 10s video to that individual where they can mentally tick all the boxes that they want in on your gig. Heavy lifting done by a bot and all front filtering done by the bot. >98% open rate. >50% click rate. So again - under those stats, tell me again how tired email rhetoric and practices trumps actual sales where the sales cycle is slashed to a few minutes instead of days or months again?10. For FUCKS SAKE stop beating yourself up.You’re awesome. No c*nt out there that’s you. YOU’RE you. You might not have a bajillion followers. You might not be doing 80000000 bajillion figures. But you know what? 9 times out of ten - those claims are bullshit anyway. Won’t name names (although people I know will grin at these..), but when I was starting out in personal training years ago, two of the biggest UK names I met personally. Stars in my eyes. Turns out they were both properly fucked up: One was supposed to leave for the US straight after a weekend show I was asked to speak at by them. I didn’t get to speak, despite flying from Oz to the UK. Turns out I met them in a coffee shop at a shitty seaside town in the uk a few days after the event: They were staying in a caravan at a holiday park. Starry-eyed Nate died at that precise moment. The other? Meh. Talked a really good talk as a lot of people do, but then went off the boil as it was quickly apparent to them I knew more than them, and without warning I found snark and negativity from him and his followers. Lesson learnt? You’re awesome. You should know that you don’t know, and be humble enough to seek help from sources you can fill that info void. I can’t stress how much I’ve relied on udemy, Lynda, YouTube and Reddit over the years. TL;DR - focus on your own sales and judge yourself on how well you did compared to last week, last quarter, same period as this time last year etc. DO NOT JUDGE based on lying pricks on social media - you’re going to have a bad time you and your mental wellbeing, if you do.11. There’s heaps more I got. This is just shit off the top of my headGenuinely, #PLUR - I keep writing it at the end of my posts but it’s an old raving days term for Peace. Love. Unity. Respect. A lot of them I need to work on (refer to me thinking a lot of people in the online space are total fucking cunts