Tuesday, October 23, 2007

What is it, exactly, you do here at this company?

Intermezzo!

In order to lighten the load of my occasionally ambiguous references to my current relocation: why am I in Paramaribo, rather than freezing my ass off in Amsterdam?

From the start:

I am a senior frontend developer at the web company Us Media in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Our company is an active partner in a new company in Surinam, Spang Makandra. This company will be actively developing web and ict projects in the Caribbean area with a young and very enthusiastic crew of locals. Our part as a web company in the first phase of this project is to teach and train them in solid, best-practice web development. This covers XHTML/CSS, Flash and PHP in the course of nine months, after which Spang Makandra will offer nine of the trainees a steady job at the company. The rest will have learned enough during their stay to easily be gobbled up by -or becoming- the competition. Rather than making an offshore sweatshop, this is wholly dedicated to raising the bar of web development in Surinam, a surfacing market nowadays.

My colleague Wouter has been training them in applications and basic XHTML semantics, and I took over the torch this week to train them in the more fickle arts of compliant XHTML/CSS pages. By the time I'm done with them, they'll be more than ready to deal with cross-browser compatibility, semantically sound web pages, and some of the cleanest markup in Surinam web developer circles. They've shown pretty good progress, and are eager to learn everything they can get their hands on.

It definitely helps that all of them aren't scarred and corrupted by bad HTML practices. Save for a few, a background in web and design work was never the case. I'm pleased to see they pick up on web standards as if it's second nature -better trainees one couldn't ask for.

During the next five weeks, I'll be spending the weekday evenings after work in a rented appartment in the suburbs of southwest Paramaribo. Weekends, I cannot say for sure, but no doubt I will be able to see a bit more of this rather pleasant place.

1 Comments:

Blogger ava said...

beep!
It's 28th! What happend with 25th? Since I cannot find anything written later than this:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY N! :*
ps. pls check: probably something awfull happend to your mobile. and I hate voicemail!

October 28, 2007 at 12:08 PM  

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