Rick Hurst Full-Stack Developer in Bristol, UK

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Review: Professional Plone Development part 1

Firstly an apology: I was sent Martin Aspeli’s Professional Plone Development for review back in October last year, and I still haven’t got round to reviewing it – not out of laziness, but extreme time shortage due to going freelance/ starting a company last year. Hopefully I can make amends now by reviewing it section by section as I jump into Plone 3.

A bit of background about me and Plone: I have worked predominantly with Plone for about 4 years, coming from a background in classic asp and php. My area of Plone expertise is front end templating and skinning, which was my main area of usefulness at Netsight for a couple of years. I have also presented a couple of Plone based workshops at Bristol Skillswap, attended two Plone conferences and a Snow Sprint. Despite this involvement with Plone, I have had a love/hate relationship with it, at times thoroughly lost deep down in the software stack, and fighting my tendency to think purely in terms of scripts and relational databases, other times singing it’s praises to anyone who will listen. Since leaving Netsight I have only worked on one Plone (2) project, as i’ve gone back to my old ways, favouring php for most projects, but just got stuck into an inherited Plone 3 project, and started using a vanilla Plone 3 site as a knowledge base/document repository/intranet/extranet for my own company, olivewood. (Hosted on a mac mini in-house, which I thoroughly recommend, but that’s another post!).

I’m currently feeling a little lost, with the Plone 3, which is why I decided to finally start reading/ reviewing the book.
Ok, enough about me, lets talk about the book: I opened the book last night and read through the foreword by Alexander Limi, and the first chapter. It left me with a fantastic feeling about Plone and the future of Plone – it summarised what is different about Plone, and how important (and fun) it is to participate in the Plone community to get the best out of it – the polar opposite to working with a proprietary product, where the vendor tries to cultivate a community around it, but it’s not the same. It also made me feel slightly guilty for moaning about aspects of Plone in the past – who exactly was I complaining to? I resolved to make sure that the next time something frustrates me, that I actively participate in making the situation better, i.e. to at least actively become part of the problem, if not part of the solution!

Chapter 1 covers Zope and Plone history, Plone as application vs Plone as framework, considerations for when deciding if Plone is the right tool for the job, and the importance of the community.
A couple of other things I learned from the foreword and chapter 1:-

  • The original release of Plone was built (predominantly*) by just two people, Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan who didn’t meet until Europython 2002 just after the first release
  • The Goldegg initiative is a sponsored effort to improve Plone’s framework stack, not a type of python egg!

Ok, I will try to deliver another installment as soon as possible, but i won’t necessarily be doing it in order – i’ll be skipping straight to chapter 8 (skinning)
* Building on top of Zope/ CMF – the work of many people!

archived comments

Hi!

Thanks for buying the book. I hope you enjoy it. 🙂

I would probably read the chapters in order, or at least skim them in order. You’ll find it a bit hard to grasp some of the things chapter 8 otherwise. At least, I’d read chapters 3 and 5 first.

Cheers,
Martin

Martin Aspeli 2008-09-18 22:22:29

Thanks for the compliments on the foreword. Interestingly enough, that foreword has generated more nice personal emails to me than anything else I can remember writing. 😉

Alexander Limi 2008-09-18 23:15:37

Back from BathCamp 08

I attended BathCamp at the weekend and it was great fun. I met some lovely people, talked geek and gave a short talk on (“the gurgitator”) a python script I have been writing, which I use to generate boiler plate code for web projects in different technologies (i’ll write about this when it is further down the line). I haven’t got time to do a full write-up, but wanted to thank the people who made it happen. Check out the photos on flickr: mine all

One year in freelance – the good, the bad and the ugly

It’s now just over a year since I went freelance, so I thought i’d share my experiences. First of all i’ll recap why I decided to make the move in the first place – mainly because of a business venture opportunity (olivewood – a web applications company, with products for servicing e-commerce and e-procurement), but also because I liked the idea of trying freelance full time, having been “moonlancing” for some time in addition to my day web developer job.

Since I made the move, I’ve been wearing two hats – that of freelance web monkey (or front end web developer) and that of Technical Director of Olivewood Data Technologies. The idea is that I would pay the bills by working short contracts as a freelancer, leaving spare time to work on web applications for Olivewood to sell. From day one it went straight off track! In addition to a few days a week working as a freelance resource for various web design agencies, I was offered a number of larger projects, which I took on under the Olivewood banner. After only a few weeks in I was juggling these larger projects with the on-site freelance work and soon had to start declining the on-site work, to make time for the larger projects.

Even dedicating all my time to the larger projects I was struggling so started to employ freelancers myself to delegate the workload. For a while this worked out, and it looked for a while like Olivewood might itself become a web design agency, using freelancers where needed, and starting to look into permanent employees. Some of the projects went really well, but it was getting difficult to manage the projects and find time to do any actual coding myself. So before I knew it I had become a project manager, albeit one who still tried to code and fulfill every other role in a snowballing company.

Meanwhile, very little progress was being made with the Olivewood products, so I was soon completely losing site of my original goals. I was also having other issues with finding and managing resources. I think one of the reasons I was offered so many projects in the first place is that I have a very diverse web development skillset (nb. i’ve started to refer to this as “swiss army knife” rather than the more negative “jack of all trades”!), so I ended up with projects spanning plone, front end web build, php, drupal, asp and asp.net. Finding local, available, freelancers with a similar skillset isn’t easy, and the time it takes to brief and manage remote freelancers made it extremely difficult to turn projects around on time and with a profit. Even so, it was still working, albeit only with me working most evenings and weekends – something I wanted to get away from by going full-time self employed.

Then I met my nemesis – a project I vastly underestimated, with a tight deadline and a tighter budget. Deadlines were missed and all the budget was spent on additional resources. Out of pride/stubbornness/professional integrity/stupidity I carried on, starting to decline other work, and push back other ongoing projects to make time to get the project finished, working ridiculously long hours throughout, and surviving on the profits of previous successful projects. This was a painful lesson in being careful what I agree to take on. It also forced me to re-evaluate the direction I was going in, and was fundamental in me getting back on track with the original goals.

So here I am now one year in, older, greyer and hopefully a bit wiser and on the verge of clearing my backlog of work to start afresh with a goal of keeping a balance on the work I need to take on to pay the bills and finding time to work on my future business goals. I recently had to decline a project that would have kept me busy for another month or so, which was painful but necessary. Turning down work is difficult, but the experience of the last twelve months has shown me that it is vital to be realistic.

In summary, it’s been a mixed bag – i’ve really enjoyed the freedom and excitement of being freelance, but I haven’t enjoyed the extra project management/ resourcing/ admin needed to run my own show. I’ve also learned the hard way about biting off more than I can chew. I’m still positive about it all – I see the difficult aspects as vital learning experiences that I needed to go through to get onto the next stage of my adventure.

archived comments

It’s tales like these that keep me shackled to the life of a part-time wage-slaved moonlancer. That and the fact that a monitor tan is not a good look for me . But fair play to you mate for sticking with it and staying positive. I admire your cohanas (for sticking with it that is..!)

Iain Claridge 2008-07-04 10:54:13

… that should read “cahonas”..!

Iain Claridge 2008-07-11 12:00:16

Hey Rick, nice to hear your story of freelance so far!

I definately hear where you’re coming from, wearing multiple hats, trying to juggle everything! I was freelance for 3 years before I was tempted back into the world of the salary again by Aardman.

It just got a bit too much, having to manage everything and juggle my time, it felt like a neverending struggling with the great benefits of working for myself but not the financial rewards!

good to hear things are going good for you and you’ve been offered lots of things!!

good luck!

~ Gav.

Gavin Strange 2008-07-18 11:20:25

a change is as good as a rest

mobile working

I’ve been working so much recently, clearing a huge backlog of work that i’ve got into a habit of mobile working again, as a way of varying the endless hours sat staring at a screen. Despite having some lovely studio space, I find it helps my productivity to wander off and work in a few different places. The 3 mobile broadband has made this even more of a possibility now, not having to stick to places with free wifi, although I did fail to connect from the back of one cafe up in clifton. I’ve also been making the most of the weather with a bit of garden working 🙂

garden working

New drupal based site – Green Infrastructure in the west of England

Olivewood have recently launched a new drupal based site Green Infrastructure in the west of England.

Green Infrastructure in the West of England

This has actually been quietly live for a while now, but wanted to monitor how it coped with the fairly heavy load exerted by the AJAX based mapping tool, which bought our dev server to it’s knees during original user testing, before being moved to a server with a bit more RAM.
GI Mapping tool

Olivewood Studio



I’ve just started renting some studio space in the infamous Tobacco factory in Bristol. This will be where most of the day to day running of Olivewood will take place, though I will still be working from the Ubley office from time to time. I actually worked in a studio in the tobacco factory at the beginning of the decade, when a certain large digital agency were based here. This is a much more relaxed vibe though, as i’m renting space from (and sharing tea making duties with) the lovely Fanatic Design.

archived comments

If you don’t mind me asking, I wondered how much rental kinda costs on a space like you have within that unit? I might be looking to move into a separate office at some stage and would probably only need a big desk, phone line, internet access and wondered how expensive/inexpensive it is? Thanks.

David Sandy 2008-01-02 08:09:20

Looks good Rick – so two offices now then! 🙂

Nik

Nik 2008-01-02 11:03:38

new toy – casio elixim Z1050

I recently bought a new compact camera – a tiny casio elixim Z1050. Historically I have always been disappointed with the performance of compact digital cameras, mainly because of shutter lag. This one is much better, with only a tiny lag at 10 megapixels. Although one day i’d like to get a digital SLR, for now I just wanted a compact to carry with me to snap pictures I can use for web sites, and also to take a few skateboarding pictures. One feature that has proven to be excellent for the latter is the high-speed continuous mode with takes several shots a second at 2 megapixels, allowing me to grab a sequence (like below, or just take the best frame from several, to get the best action shot.)

rick hurst sequence taken by casio Z1050

Best frame – original pic is 2 megapixels – fine for snapshot prints and web stuff:-

rick hurst fs disaster on st george whippy bank

archived comments

I wish I was skateboarding there, that looks so fun.

sirjorge 2007-12-18 00:23:33

Bristol Skillswap Relaunched



I attended the relaunched Bristol Skillswap last night at Goldbrick House in Bristol. The new format is called “Talking Points” – five chairs in a circle, one of which is always empty. Someone starts a (web related) subject to discuss with the other seated people, when someone in the room wants to join in, they claim the empty chair and someone else has to leave. When this was being explained by organise Laura Francis, I was initially worried that this was all a bit musical chairs, and end up with four people sat there trying to persuade people to join them. In reality it worked straight away, and there was always people ready to jump in and claim the empty chair. If anyone needed proof that geeks can have the same arguments in real life that they do on a mailing list or forum – this was it!
The first session was kicked off by Andy Budd – “Are standards still relevant?”, followed by Elliot Jay Stocks (Carsonified), followed by Matt Jones (Dopplr). Matts session was more of a traditional talk format – but the relaxed atmosphere and free beer ensured plenty of audience participation in the form of heckling.

bristol skillswap at goldbrick house bristol

more pics

d.Construct 2007

dConstruct view from the back

The d.Construct conference was excellent, this is the first one i’ve been to, but by all accounts it has raised the bar a bit since the first one two(?) years ago. The theme was definitely that of User Experience, and the talks were mainly conceptual rather than technical – I guess this would have appealed to some more than others, but coming from the point of view of someone who just started a company, with imminent plans for creating a (web) product, this was right up my alley. I haven’t got time to do a proper write-up, because I have a back-log of work and some deadlines to meet, and I resisted the temptation to open my laptop and hammer away at the keyboard in the Auditorium (unlike some people – give it a break guys!). Well done to the speakers, the clearleft crew and all others involved in organising it.