"Team leads are different. Your job, should you accept it, is to become what I’ve lovingly dubbed Shit Umbrella. Your goal is to find all of the peripheral stuff involved in getting the product out the door—important stuff, such as making sure the delivery schedule for the new servers makes sense for when you want to ship the product that needs them, or taking customer calls at 11 PM on a Sunday because their account quit working and they want to know why they should keep paying you, or figuring out when doing features the sales and support teams want makes financial sense—and then coming back and presenting a focused direction to all the developers so that they can get the features written without worrying about how they actually ship. You switch from doing the building yourself to enabling others to build stuff on your behalf."

"I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying."

Useful from the other side i.e. how to be hired as a consultant and not suck.

"A single page jobs aggregator"

"Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch."

"How some of the traits we have as developers keep us from evolving and our market from maturing" plus some good stuff on YQL.

"A [front end developer] is responsible for everything that sits on the client side of the web stack — the content, presentation and behaviour layers. Few other roles touch so many other key aspects of a business as does a [front end developer]’s." Amen to that.

"So, is Interaction Design a dead-end job? As an expertise, no. But as a discrete service offering or a career path, I say absolutely." Slightly inflammatory; read on for the significant caveat.

"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." Pies, pies, the sky is all pies.

"When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others."

Useful reminder.

Bit of a scare-story headline but some decent points here.

Digital media recruiters near Old Street.

"Some people are naturally wide, some people are naturally deep. But the assumption is, in most business contexts, that you can — and should want to — jump between the two as the need or situation dictates. But this is a load of crap."

"or why I won't, until the money runs out..."

"The digital skills that job seekers must have and that hiring organizations demand are varied, nuanced and cutting-edge."

"Some personal observations, reasons I probably would click away, not hire someone, not call back."

"Despite waves of consolidation across the ad-agency business, there remains a healthy bunch of independent digital shops doing everything from search optimization to building web interfaces to simply doing damn good creative. "

"The first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide."

"Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat."

"Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities."

"3×5 notecards for studying the patterns in the book, Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas"

"Conducting effective interviews requires a balance of instinct, insight, and some solid preparation. It also helps if you don't make certain blunders, such as monopolizing the conversation, asking leading questions, or applying too much (or too little) p

"In terms of your career, this means that you should be setting aside time for training and development — some of which is focused on making you better at your current job and some of which is focused on getting you towards the next step in your career

"Here’s a catalog of career refactorings you can apply to help move yourself towards your own vision of what you want to be doing next."

Becoming a product manager is a logical move for many UX practitioners, as it requires many of the same skills, traits, and competencies involved in crafting a user experience. Additionally, product management is a common role within many organizations, m

Point 5: " Web development is a precise field. Leaving out one character of code can render an entire website useless. Good web developers always focus on making sure they understand and deliver things as accurate as possible."

"Some information [regarding what] people are actually expecting from a good web developer."

"A top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn."

"Authentic Jobs is a targeted destination for standards-aware designers and developers and the companies seeking to hire them."

"Don't be afraid, little sufferer of ADD.... there is hope. Get the f*ck out of the boxes!"

"The #1 rule of good criticism is be specific."

"Independent contractor filter: what is the best way to simultaneously raise my rates and not lose the business?"

Missed this first time round: "The web needs more front-end architects before poor implementations of front-end technology hobble the potential benefits of recent advances."

"The list is not specific to any particular type of development position, but I tried to balance it between both the design/html/usability side of things and the back-end/database/programming side."

"Charge more if there's a lot of value being extracted, if the work is dull, and if there's risk involved; charge less if the work takes the company in good directions, if it's really interesting, and if it's for people we like."

Handy tips from Giles

"If you are a freelance or small Web design firm, I have an uncomfortable question to ask you: are you thinking too small?"

"Use the tips here to hire better, or find a new job."

"a short, non-definitive list of things that have made interviews go well — for me"

...you'll be asked on a job interview