When you go to networking events where you only have a few minutes to introduce yourself, I often hear developers talking about their actual craft as “I write code, and I do backend/frontend/anything” or “I’m a Ruby developer and I do web apps.”. And when they have to introduce their studio it would be something along those lines: “We develop website for small and medium business like X,Y,Z”

Here is the catch: 95% percent of the time the person in front of you doesn’t have enough technical knowledge to understand what you really do (Ruby, PHP, Java doesn’t really matters to them), and as a website developer, well you’re just one amongst many other.

I’m a (Ruby) developer, and I come up with solutions for my clients’ problems.

This is how I usually introduce myself. If the person in front of me is not a developer I can safely omit the Ruby part, as they won’t care.
What’s important in that sentence is the second part: “I come up with solutions for my clients”. This can lead to a lot of open questions, depending on the other person’s interest:

• What type of solutions?
• What type of problems?
• Who are your clients?

But what’s more important is that it’s how I feel about my day-to-day job. As a developer it’s too easy to stay focused on the daily code writing and deduct that your job is actually writing code. But when you step back and think about those countless hours trying to figure out ways to achieve task X in a nice way, or to achieve resource-intensive task Y using as small a footprint as possible, or when you’re on your 3rd revision of task Z because you think that your client will really benefit from the changes you’re bringing, then you realise that coding is not really your job it is just the best way to solve the problems your mind identifies.

We design tailored e-commerce and web software for startups.

I don’t want CookiesHQ to be any old web development studio. I want us to be known for writing good code, delivering on time and budget, and most of all, I wan’t us to be known for coming up with solutions tailored to the end client business.

As developers it’s too easy to get excited by a task and only see the engineering challenges. But what we have to keep in mind is that the solution we have to find needs to be the best solution for the client not the best solution for our ego.

Why is the difference important?

Again, it is important because it means that we are not just implementing what our clients want, but we are always thinking about ways to improve their solution.

In the end it will ensure a better website, a better solution for the end user, and a happy client.

Don’t we all love happy clients?