Category: Uncategorized

I went to a really interesting skillswap last night thanks to the nameless crew – “When Content Management goes bad”. Thanks to all involved.

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.

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 🙂

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.

more pics

I’m a couple of days into the Plone snow sprint 2006. Before we arrived at the sprint location, the netsight contingent took a couple of days snowboarding. After half a day of falling on my backside, I just about have basic control of the board now, at least I can carve down the slope quite comfortably if the run is wide enough – there were a few hairy moments on a narrow forest road where I couldn’t quite make the turns quick enough and wiped out at least one skier (luckily I don’t speak enough German to understand what they were shouting at me!). I’d definitely like to snowboard again, though it is an expensive hobby.

We then attended the opening party for the newly formed lovely systems in Dornbirn. Free bar, Live band, games involving hammers, ’nuff said.

I’ll be working on a few plone multimedia projects during the sprint. Myself and Tom Lazaar [Broken link removed] will be trying to sort out some kind of solution for blogging in plone. Currently we are examining the available options to see whether we are better off cherrypicking the best features from each and putting the together into something new, to “finish” one the existing ones off, or whether to work on a set of adapters (xml-rpc, trackback) and products to enable plone itself to be used as a blog application (using, say, news items instead of blog entries, and having a customisation policy to set a plone instance up as a blog).

I will also hopefully be working (or at least shadowing someone else working on) a flash media player (a bit like google video thing), including server-side video transcoding. This should be useful for the online skate zine i’m working on!

Hopefully I can also finish off what I started for ATAudio, tidying up the templates ready for a release, using so called “five views”.

which is why I walked to work today.

If you are reading this upside down then chances are you are looking for information on how to get your display to appear the right way up. I had this problem the other day when one of my cats was wandering around on my laptop keyboard, and suddenly the display was upside down.

This won’t work for all displays as it is driver dependent, but CTRL – ALT and either the up or down arrows flips the display over on mine.

I’m sitting here with my arm in plaster. some people are being sympathetic, most aren’t. after all, I am too old to skate

Recently i’ve been using Bloglines [link removed] news aggregator to subscribe to all the RSS/RDF enabled websites which I visit regularly. This has completely changed my browsing habits. Bloglines works in much the same way as an email inbox – you can see which sites have been updated from a list in the left pane.

So now rather than trawling through bookmarks and tabs only to find that a site hasn’t been updated since I last looked, I only visit sites that have new content.

Depending on how the RSS has been set-up you either get a list of new headlines, a list of new headlines and summaries or in some cases the whole article. Whichever way, clicking the title will take you straight to the article on the actual site.

Article over at Digital Web Magazine discussing the "Behaviour Layer" of a website.

In summary, a typical web page has three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour. In this context, XHTML is the content Layer, CSS is the presentation layer and Javascript is the behaviour layer. The article argues that it is important that the site functions with various combinations of these e.g (content + presentation + behaviour), (content + presentation) or (content + behaviour). Essential behaviour such as form validation that has been added client-side using Javascript should also be replicated server-side ("belt and braces")..