One thing I love about my job is that, being a startup, I do it all. I came on as a systems administrator, and then became a developer. So you’d think I hung out on the back end. And I do. But I also do UI. I picked up CSS and JavaScript. I learned SEO. I do a little bit of customer service. I generated lots of custom reports on a number of metrics yesterday. Today I helped move and reassemble furniture. Furniture-moving excluded, it’s great experience. If I worked in a big company, I’d end up with a really specific niche. But at a small company, I have to be a jack of all trades.

So a number of my coworkers and I — not just our design guy — read Smashing Magazine pretty regularly. I doubt that 1% of my time focuses on design or usability, but I also think it’s something anyone working with the web ought to be comfortable with. Cross-training isn’t just useful because you can do someone else’s job; it’s useful because you understand what they do and what they need.

But occasionally, it ends up being more apropos than I’d expect. I wanted to brush up my CSS a bit and they happened to have a roundup of CSS links. I’m usually “the data guy” that people come to if they need a report pulled from our database. So when they posted a link to 22 Awesome Visualization Libraries, my interest was piqued. I’d love to build a little tool with insights into various metrics. I think the ability to generate nice graphs without having to think about doing it would be tremendously useful: when I need to manually code lines, it starts to be a pain. But when I can just bang out a few lines of code to get the data, and hand it over to a graphing framework that formats the data for me, it gets really easy to add new reporting. A JavaScript- or Flash-based one is particularly inviting, I think, because I don’t need to worry about coding the graphs at all.