Good designers and developers rule the web — they’re the ones who build it, after all. And some of the most interesting and useful players in creating the modern Internet are hybrids between those two disciplines — people who can translate between the disparate languages of the visual and the technical.

Developers who can design and designers who can code are one-stop shops and hot commodities, especially in the startup world. Being a jack of all trades allows you to quickly and effectively take products from concept to shipment — something that young companies in particular are eager to do. These hybrids also make great product managers after a bit of experience in both disciplines.

So, if you’re a hacker who wants to do more than code, or you’re a designer who yearns to work on his development chops, how do you go from being an expert in just one field to a digital Swiss army knife professional?

Here are a few steps to get you started and some 140-character tips from others who’ve gone before you. And if you’ve already achieved a professional balance between the technical and the visual in your own career and skills, we welcome your advice in the comments, as well.

Improving Skills or Learning New Ones

The most difficult part of being a developer/designer is augmenting your current skill set with an entirely new group of languages, principles and knowledge. The bad news is that this will take a lot of time and effort on your part; probably years before you’re able to credibly call yourself a professional in both fields.

The good news is that there’s a boatload of information available for free and on the cheap to help you achieve your goals. For every skill you might want to learn, from programming languages to web design principles, there are books, courses, web forums and communities, and online tutorials galore. Get yourself in a sponge-like state of mind, and start researching what you need to learn to be the designer/developer you want to be.

If you’re the newest of noobs or are having a difficult time getting started, you might be interested in going a more formal route and seeking higher education courses that correspond to your interests. Personally, I have started a community college course to learn object-oriented programming, and I can tell you that a few hours in a 200-level class have actually done a lot more for my progress than days spent reading O’Reilly books and trying to get coaching from my developer friends. Because you’re learning an entirely new dialect and way of thinking, sometimes the best place to begin is at the beginning.

Having the Right Tools for the Job

While you’re learning, you’ll discover that practicing using your new skills is one of the most fun parts of the process. And practice will eventually make perfect (or some approximation thereof), but you can’t practice much without an entirely new suite of tools.

If you’re a designer, you’ll have to play with IDEs, code repositories and versioning systems, many of which are FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Don’t be afraid to ask other developers what they use, and do some digging around to find the best tools for the languages and frameworks you’re using. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to get feedback on your designs. Check out these 10 web design feedback services for starters.

If you’re a developer, we regret to inform you that your days of FOSS for professional use are coming to an end. Professional-grade design software is going to cost you, and it doesn’t behoove a professional designer/developer to use pirated software on client projects. However, if you took the higher-education route mentioned above, you could get some pretty deep student discounts. You also might want to invest in some new hardware, particularly a stylus-controlled graphics tablet, if you don’t have one already.

Some of the most exciting parts of your new toolkit will be the design/development workflows that allow you to exercise your new and more seasoned skills at the same time. For example, Adobe has some interesting design/development handoff software between Flash and Flex that you might want to check out. You might also want to test out split-screen design/code interfaces (these can be great as training wheels).

Networking Your Way to Greatness

As you read, practice and search for solutions to your problems, be they botched designs or buggy code. If you’re a new designer, you should be on the lookout for new blogs to add to your RSS feed (we especially recommend these people); if you’re new to coding, find a few hacker/bloggers in your preferred language or languages to follow around the web.

In the Venn diagram of web designers and web developers, there’s a healthy overlapping section of folks who’ve made successful careers from hybridized skill sets. Definitely read those blogs and make yourself a Twitter list of those people, as well.

One interesting trend we’ve seen is a new crop of microsharing sites just for developers and designers. You can post snippets of code, be they beautiful or problematic; or you can share snapshots of your latest design. Others in the community will be there to give you feedback, advice and encouragement as needed. For new designers, check out Dribbble. For people new to coding, try CodeSnipp.it, and check for good examples at UseTheSource. And both designers and developers can get something good out of Forrst.

Remember: The most valuable part of networking as a relative noob is receiving and integrating valid and constructive criticism. Be humble and devoted to self-improvement over self-promotion.

Building Something

As a web pro, you’re used to constantly building and creating new applications and sites. One of the first things you’ll be itching to do with your skills is to actually make something with them.

When practicing and learning, you’ll be creating a bunch of small, one-off programs and/or designs; however, as your skills advance, you should also start thinking about how you want to give back to the community and create a useful tool or application (or even a simple game) that others can use.

You can spend your days and nights tinkering away on solo work and personal side projects; building something from the ground up that looks and runs beautifully will give you an entirely new kind of pride in your work. You can also sign up for any number of hackathons if you want the added pressure of a hard deadline and the camaraderie of a collaborative environment. Here are a few hackathons we recommend; you can also gather a few friends and host one yourself.

Once you get the hang of designing and developing by yourself or as part of a small team, you might want to take on some small consulting projects to test your newfound skills under professional circumstances, too. Also, doing this work for a client rather than just for yourself will add a new level of legitimacy to your growing résumé.

Re-Entering the Job Market

Now that you’ve re-educated yourself and have actually built something (or, better yet, a few somethings) to attest to your hybrid skill set, it’s time to frame yourself as a designer/developer to the rest of the world.

Even if you’re staying with the same employer, make sure your supervisors know about and have seen your recent cross-discipline side projects. You might ask them to consider a lateral move including a wider range of tasks or a promotion with a pay raise.

If you’re a solo, consultant or freelancer, it’s time to give your website and portfolio a major overhaul. Put your new skills to work and build something amazing from the ground up. At this point, your client-facing web presence should show (i.e. actively and impressively demonstrate) rather than tell (i.e. list in text) your talents.

And if you’re in the job market looking for a full-time position, a new résumé is in order along with a new web presence. Get creative with how you showcase your dual-core skill set, and make sure you’re applying for companies and positions that need someone who can do it all, not just an expert in one field or the other.

Words of Wisdom

We reached out to a number of designer/devs on Twitter and asked for any advice they’d pass on to a designer or developer who was trying to transition into a broader career path. Here’s what they had to say:

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

Advice for Would-Be Developer/Designers

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You've been extremely helpful, so bugger off: What started out as a routine study of group behavior ended up turning a bit surreal. According to the authors of a new paper, they started out trying to find out how long a group would tolerate members that abused the common good. In the process, they found that members who put the most into the common good were quickly expelled from the group. Not entirely believing it, they replicated the findings—twice. Some of the hate comes from the overly officious group members, who viewed those who gave more than they needed to as breaking the rules. But some of it also comes from people who think that altruistic behavior like this simply raises expectations unnecessarily.

Bonus points go to the people who put the press release together for the best two opening sentences I've probably read all year: "You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with? That's right: Other people really can't stand them."

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Via Sean Bonner's tumblr, no idea where it's from.

Update: This photograph was taken by Carlton Reid, and the stencil street art it documents is the work of Peter Drew of Adelaide, Australia.

Whenever a game is previewed, a writer is going to ask about the length. Whenever the length of a game is given in a review, there is bound to be someone in the comments wailing about the state of modern gaming, and it's always the same gripe: "Since when is it okay to release a game at X price that's only Y hours long?" Last week a group of developers wrote a series of articles arguing that more isn't always better, and that a focus on length is destructive.

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About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about a research paper in which Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and I detailed serious security flaws in India's electronic voting machines. Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are "tamperproof," but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source.

The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.

At 5:30 Saturday morning, about ten police officers arrived at Hari's home in Hyderabad. They questioned him about where he got the machine we studied, and at around 8 a.m. they placed him under arrest and proceeded to drive him to Mumbai, a 14 hour journey.

The police did not state a specific charge at the time of the arrest, but it appears to be a politically motivated attempt to uncover our anonymous source. The arresting officers told Hari that they were under "pressure [from] the top," and that he would be left alone if he would reveal the source's identity.

Hari was allowed to use his cell phone for a time, and I spoke with him as he was being driven by the police to Mumbai:

The Backstory

India uses paperless electronic voting machines nationwide, and the Election Commission of India, the country's highest election authority, has often stated that the machines are "perfect" and "fully tamper-proof." Despite widespread reports of election irregularities and suspicions of electronic fraud, the Election Commission has never permitted security researchers to complete an independent evaluation nor allowed the public to learn crucial technical details of the machines' inner workings. Hari and others in India repeatedly offered to collaborate with the Election Commission to better understand the security of the machines, but they were not permitted to complete a serious review.

Then, in February of this year, an anonymous source approached Hari and offered a machine for him to study. This source requested anonymity, and we have honored this request. We have every reason to believe that the source had lawful access to the machine and made it available for scientific study as a matter of conscience, out of concern over potential security problems.

Later in February, Rop Gonggrijp and I joined Hari in Hyderabad and conducted a detailed security review of the machine. We discovered that, far from being tamperproof, it suffers from a number of weaknesses. There are many ways that dishonest election insiders or other criminals with physical access could tamper with the machines to change election results. We illustrated two ways that this could happen by constructing working demonstration attacks and detailed these findings in a research paper, Security Analysis of India's Electronic Voting Machines. The paper recently completed peer review and will appear at the ACM Computer and Communications Security conference in October.

Our work has produced a hot debate in India. Many commentators have called for the machines to be scrapped, and 16 political parties representing almost half of the Indian parliament have expressed serious concerns about the use of electronic voting.

Earlier this month at EVT/WOTE, the leading international workshop for electronic voting research, two representatives from the Election Commission of India joined in a panel discussion with Narasimha Rao, a prominent Indian electronic voting critic, and me. (I will blog more about the panel in coming days.) After listening to the two sides argue over the security of India's voting machines, 28 leading experts in attendance signed a letter to the Election Commission stating that "India’s [electronic voting machines] do not today provide security, verifiability, or transparency adequate for confidence in election results."

Nevertheless, the Election Commission continues to deny that there is a security problem. Just a few days ago, Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi told reporters that the machines "are practically totally tamper proof."

Effects of the Arrest

This brings us to today's arrest. Hari is spending Saturday night in a jail cell, and he told me he expects to be interrogated by the authorities in the morning. Hari has retained a lawyer, who will be flying to Mumbai in the next few hours and who hopes to be able to obtain bail within days. Hari seemed composed when I spoke to him, but he expressed great concern for his wife and children, as well as for the effect his arrest might have on other researchers who might consider studying electronic voting in India.

If any good has come from this, it's that there has been an outpouring of support for Hari. He has received positive messages from people all over India.

Unfortunately, the entire issue distracts from the primary problem: India's electronic voting machines have fundamental security flaws, and do not provide the transparency necessary for voters to have confidence in elections. To fix these problems, the Election Commission will need help from India's technical community. Arresting and interrogating a key member of that community is enormously counterproductive.

—
Professor J. Alex Halderman is a computer scientist at the University of Michigan.

I think it's worth noting that the "group identification" he discusses is a double-edged sword. While it can conceivably lead to a global state of harmony, it's also a powerful tool used by those who market goods, services, and dogma to the masses. But I think it can be argued that the ability of humans to remotely perceive what's happening across the world (with television, the internet, etc.) is one of the keys to making the speaker's vision a reality. However, the dark side is that these technologies also have the ability to rapidly subdivide groups based on their members' strongest feelings and create echo chambers that have the pernicious effect of insulating them from understanding the global human experience.

Telesensing is something that could dramatically alter this equation, and it's a subject that I think about often. But that's for another post. Without further rambling, here's the video:

As more states move away from using insecure DREs, there’s a risk that thousands of these machines will clog our landfills. Fortunately, our results show that they can be productively repurposed. We believe that in the not-so-distant future, recycled DREs will provide countless hours of entertainment in the basements of the nation’s nerds.

To see how we did it, visit our Pac-Man on the AVC Edge voting machine site.

I think this is a little misleading as things like video and P2P are initiated (and encapsulated) by the web. But it's a good indication of where investment and innovation needs to go in terms of making the most of our networks.

Interestingly, a commenter from Boing Boing took the graph and reproduced it in terms of absolute traffic instead of percentages:

Which shows the dramatic hockey stick of growth. I'd love to see a corresponding graph of the capital cost for core network switches in terms of bytes/sec.