Category: Uncategorized

I thought i’d note down some plans for 2010, by revisiting my plans for 2009 to see how I got on and what still applies.

• Launch a web app
  I didn’t get there with that, so carrying that one over. There’s various things on the boil…
• Relaunch Too Old To Skate
  I managed this, although I still don’t consider it “finished” – I want it to return to more of a personal blog format – it seems a bit impersonal as it is, just regurgitating mostly other people’s content. Of course the lack of my own content is mostly down to me not skateboarding enough and not taking many pictures or filming anything, so getting away from the laptop and doing some of that is more important at the moment!
• Attend at least one web conference
  Yep, want to do this again – I went to bamboo juice in cornwall and FOWD Bristol in 2009, and enjoyed them both. I think the value is in creative inspiration rather than specific technical content. Being a freelancer means that single day conferences are more suitable for me, as it can get a bit expensive (lost earnings plus fees/ hotels/ travel).
• Attend at least one barcamp
  I had a good time at Bathcamp Barcamp again, so hopefully that will happen again, in a similar format (i.e. actual camping).
• Fix on a php framework
  I’ve used cake on a couple of things and abandoned my plans to use magento, so zend framework has been increasingly sidelined. Cake is probably therefore the one i’ve “fixed” on, although it just isn’t relevant to most of the php work i’ve been doing, so it hasn’t become the focus of my development. I think getting a better grip on OO PHP5 in general is a better focus for me right now rather than concentrating on a particular framework.
• Get to grips with plone 3 skinning
  Nope, didn’t touch plone this year, but i’m very interested in what is happening with plone 4, Dexterity and Deliverance, so hopefully there will be the opportunity to dip my toes into that.
• Get further than “hello world” with Django
  I have got a bit further with that, but I haven’t used it on an actual commercial project yet. Hoping to get really stuck into django in 2010.
• Better customer service (saying no to projects sometimes)
  I managed this really well for the first half of the year, then took on just one project too many in the second half, and spent the last few months doing nothing but firefighting again – hopefully i’ll get this right for the whole year in 2010.
• Put up a proper portfolio
  No chance! I got as far as tagging a few blog posts with a “portfolio” tag though to at least keep track of stuff i’ve worked on.
• Use and understand some technologies that i’ve been ignoring
  I’m using JSON a lot now, and someone explained to me what a decorator class was – I nearly understood, so that’s good!
• Do more on-site freelancing for agencies.
  I did quite a bit of that in 2009 and enjoyed it, and will be spending at least the first few months of 2010 contracting at Aardman studios. I’m also really excited about the work i’m doing, and learning about the film making process so this is all good.
• Keep trading and survive the credit crunch recession
  I survived 2009 and will be starting 2010 in a better financial position that I started 2009, bit i’m not resting on my laurels!

So it’s more of the same really this year, but I think i’m a bit more focused. I’m still working primarily with PHP, but i’m really keen to rekindle my python development skills, starting with Django. There’s at least one contract I would have loved to have applied for recently if I hadn’t neglected python over the past few years, so i’ll be making this focus of my self-learning throughout 2010.

Help Bristol have a presence at the SXSWi festival in Austin Texas, by voting for some of the panels listed here:-

http://www.bristolmedia.co.uk/2009/8/17/vote-team-bristol-for-texas

While this blog is usually confined to techno-babble and “professional” stuff, it used to have a more personal tone. This post is all about me and is part of a meme called seven things, after Jon Tan deemed me interesting enough to join in!

1. Most of my teens and my early twenties I spent obsessing about being a rock star. I spent hours every day playing my bass guitar. I found it impossible to listen to music without dreaming up a scenario where I would end up in the band I was listening to – “no way – the Smiths are reforming, but Andy Rourke has lost an arm!! There’s only one option, and that is to ask Rick Hurst to join the band“. The peak of my music “career” was being dropped from a band on the advice of famous songwriter Guy Chambers. I’ve been to his house. He made me a cup of tea.

2. I only ended up with a career in web development by accident. I actually have a degree in environmental science, and tried for years to get a job in that field, but couldn’t get my foot in the door due to lack of experience. A friend suggested I put my cv on the “internet”, so I bought a dial-up modem and a copy of HTML for dummies, and six months later I was a professional web designer (it was the dot com boom – HTMLers were thin on the ground).

3. In 1997 I spent six months living in a van traveling around spain. I camped in the Andalucian mountains, in the woods and in urban streets, and lived like a king on about £15 a week. I supported myself by busking (mostly radiohead and oasis songs) to English tourists. With time on my hands I also wrote about fifty songs of my own, which later turned out to mostly the same, and a bit rubbish.

4. Most of my childhood I had a lazy eye and regularly used to have to wear an eye patch over the non-lazy one to encourage me to use the other one. I still find it difficult to look through both at once, but at least they now both point in the same direction. As a result i’m rubbish at ball sports, catching and 3D pictures/ films don’t work. Or those magic eye pictures.

5. I only met Jon Tangerine in bristol a couple of years ago, but our paths must have crossed on a regular basis in the early 90’s when he ran an acid jazz club night called “stump juice” at the connaught hotel in wolverhampton, where I was a student. I’ve never really been into clubbing, but that was a regular for me and my housemates, and considered a legendary night amongst wolverhamptonites with a vintage clothing habit.

6. I grew up in the East Anglian fens, and it nearly all ended there when I was 17. I was a passenger in a nasty car accident which resulted in myself and four other people crawling from the wreckage of a ford granada upside down in a ditch. Miraculously we all escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Although I’m a confident driver, I’m a really nervous passenger, and can’t stand being in a car with an erratic or risk-taking driver.

7. I got married in Las Vegas in 2001. The wedding cost 175 dollars, then we hired a convertible pontiac firebird and went on a road trip around nevada and california for our honeymoon, courtesy of egg. Hopefully we’ll go back one day and renew our vows, and take our kid on a US road trip – maybe in a winnebago this time!

Ok, thats my ego indulged, so now according to the rules I have to “tag” seven people. For this to work, they need to be people who have a blog. While I know some interesting people who happily document their lives in the walled garden of facebook et al, they have decided that blogging isn’t for them, and hence rules them out in this occasion!

Keeping it in the family:

James Hurst – my cousin – talented web developer, musician, owner of River Rat Records and thoroughly nice bloke.

Some locals:

Iain Claridge – netsight/freelance designer and my barometer on what is cool and stylish

Skateboarders

Whether you are interested in skateboarding or not, most of the skaters I know are creative in some way. There is a tendency for skateboarders to document themselves and their friends – photos, videos and blogs – skateboarders are all over it. I did actually intend to only tag skaters for this, but the people I had in mind have either let their blogs die or have already been tagged.

Mark Mapstone – I internet stalked Mark before I met him when I discovered he was a blogging skateboarder like myself. He can fly through the air like a bird on or off a skateboard and is a very entertaining writer.

Gavin Strange – aka jamfactory The most creatively prolific person i’ve met. He skates (occasionally!), designs boards, and takes photos and video of people riding them. and rides one of those bikes that don’t let you freewheel.

Bob Lands – Although the boblands site is no more, he’s gone all arty, bought an old camera from a charity shop and now blogs at surf or pie. He will be embarrassed by this, but it will get him back for encouraging random strangers to hug me in public (long story).

Whip – I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he’s got a cool popemobile van

For those i’ve tagged, and can’t resist the urge to ignore me:-

1. Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Bristol appears on this innovation map complied by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum. This is fantastic recognition for Bristol. However, as Andy Parkhouse of Team Rubber points out, local government support is extremely patchy when it comes to the digital media industry that helped put us on the map. Bristol seems to be suceeding, despite the lack of funding, but there are numerous successful projects in the city, such as Bristol Media and BMEX, that are being virtually ignored when it comes to funding. As pointed out in one of the comments, it seems that as far as SWRDA are concerned, if it isn’t an old building, or doesn’t appear on TV, they just don’t understand it.

just a quick experiment to see if I can post from my N95. I’ve borrowed a bluetooth keyboard to see if it is useable/ useful

I set up a mysql database earlier and was getting a very slow response (about 4 seconds to connect) from a php script on another server. Both servers were windows (yeah I know, not my choice!). After a bit of googling I found the cause of this is DNS checking that occurs for incoming requests from seperate servers. The solution is to put skip-name-resolve into the mysqld section of my.ini (mysql config file)

I’ve now moved my site away from the cheap shared hosting it was on, and onto one of my own servers – hopefully there should be less downtime now, and apologies to anyone who found themselves reading some of my posts from february 2006!

I’ll be attending BathCamp in September. By way of introduction, attendees are being asked a few questions to go on the blog.

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.