[Sergio Tapia]

I've recently gone from freelancing to working at an E-Learning company with office hours. The switch was welcome as I now have less stress and can really focus on family after leaving work. The thing about freelancing is that you never really "leave" work - it's always there, lingering in the back of your head.

I couldn't be happier with my choice. It's a great job with good coworkers. (I guess I have luck in this department, never had a douchebag for a coworker in my life)

At my place of work we primarily use PHP, we use Moodle for our main workhorse but any company websites, contact forms, or whatever we may need is written in simple .php files.

Currently my coworker copy-pastes the header and footer HTML markup to many different PHP files. No, he does not even "include" that sucker in, he manually copy-pastes it. I can't argue with his results, he gets things done and ultimately that's what is important - however I'd like to show him (and the rest of our team) how a PHP framework like CakePHP can help us out in the long run.

MVC frameworks and websites go like bread and butter. He would declare his header and never ever ever have to copy and paste it somewhere else. Making changes to the header would be a matter of modifying the main layout, not each file. Benefits all around, not to mention a fantastic ORM library.

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So here's my question: How do you introduce new frameworks, tools or paradigms to coworkers?

Here are a few of my own thoughts to get things started:

• Show a clear example of how this can benefit the team.
  
• Show how marketable the skill is to have. (This is tough but can be done if you can back it up)
  
• Show how it can lighten work for the team. (Less work = more fun for all = less chances for things to break)

This post has been edited by Sergio Tapia: 12 September 2012 - 07:01 AM

[tlhIn`toq]

If the army taught me anything it was "Lead by example".

Just build the new project the right way. When people look at them and say... "Hey, that's cool. How did you do that?" you have them coming to you instead of you coming across as trying to be the training officer for your equals.

[modi123_1]

... there's always the questionable "brown bag lunch seminar"... an hour or so with you talking about it and people eating their lunches.. etc.

[tlhIn`toq]

Never do personal work on company computers even on your lunch.
But... If you had your laptop in the breakroom and were doing something on your personal site... Someone's going to ask, opening up the door

[stackoverflow]

Don't hear about some cool technology and try to force it on all your coworkers.

You: "Hey we need to use HTML5 it's so much better!"
Boss: "Ever used HTML5?"
You: "....I used it yesterday for an hour and read a blog post!"

Research it, use the technology for a few months on your own at home etc. Learn its ins and outs; its pros and cons.

Then if it's still worth it, show your team leader and demonstrate how it will improve the team/project.

This post has been edited by stackoverflow: 23 September 2012 - 06:29 AM