So here’s what I’m going to do, there’s a few subjects i want to talk about, but i’d like to do each subject justice, so instead of trying to cram it all into one mega-post i’m going to summize here, and then i might elaborate in future posts, which will be linked from here if i do. Sound good?

Great. Let’s start shall we?

2008: A Recap

Two Thousand & Eight was, on the whole a good year for me, i was finally working in London, even if the commute was a bitch, i was enjoying my job and everything was peachy. In April i took Steve to Barcelona for his birthday, that was lovely. And in the summer we enjoyed a long weekend on the Norfolk Broads with our very good friends Andy & Debz.

I turned 22, which was pretty uneventful, and after the summer my personal life took a back seat to the large projects i was working on at work.

In September we finally moved to London, north London. We’re now living in a flat in a 100+ year old converted hospital, and we couldn’t be happier. My commute to work has gone from 2hrs 15mins to around 45/50mins. Bliss.

November was fun, i was taken to Moscow, Russia with work to meet the clients we were working with, needless to say we got drunk a lot, had fun and came home with a massive hangover!

Xmas 08 was, meh. in 2007 we decided to avoid it all and go visit our friends in Dubai, i really wish we had done that in 2008, instead we were shooting from London to Kent around Kent and back to London to try and fit everyone in. Not fun.

All Work & No Play

Work has been seriously intense, not long after joining AA|RF, the team i was a part of started to jump ship, then my boss left, then the rest of the team followed. I stayed, because after Impact this place was like heaven, so my new boss was my previous bosses boss (you following?)

This was great because me and Paul get on really well, and find it really easy to work together, it’s a great working relationship where we constantly challenge one another, i’ve learnt a lot from him, and can honestly say he’s become a good friend of mine.

Those are the good aspects of work, the not-so-good aspects are pretty typical for the Technology sector, but have had an effect on me none the less. Working 87.5 hour weeks, long projects, long hours. They all take their toll, after a year of it i’ve started to feel a bit exhausted, the time off i had at Xmas was the first ‘real’ break i’d had in a long time.

As for my future there, who can say? I’m still young, i’d like to travel and see the world. All i can say is watch this space.

Battlestar Galactica: Awesomeness

A few of our friends had recommended Battlestar Galactica to us, and it’s been something we’d been meaning to investigate, well luckily for us our friend Fang came to stay with us, and bestowed upon us THE ENTIRE FREAKING SERIES 0-3 on DVD. Thank you Fang!

We watched it, and got instantly hooked, on one day we consumed a staggering 16 hours of BSG, and are actively downloading new episodes from the US as they air.

BSG simply put, is one of the most amazing pieces of SciFi/Drama i have seen in a very, very long time. It’s exceptionally well realised and the main story arc is deep and complex, to the point were throw-away incidents in the early years have major significance much later in the timeline.

If you haven’t seen it, i strongly recommend it.

Burnout Paradise

Goog God Mother of Mary. This is easily the best game i have ever played. I actually didn’t realise how much i enjoy driving games until i played this. But it’s more than just a driving game it’s a free-roaming explorative landscape (which is huge) and you drive around finding races, challenges and so on.

The real catch though, is not just gameplay but the way in which the game incorporates online-gameplay. Normally in games you have to stop what you’re doing, go to some sort of “online” menu and find a game to join.

Not in burnout. Tap right on your D-pad a couple of times and you are seamlessly dropped into an online game. I mean super seamlessly. It’s technically amazing and makes it really rewarding to get in, get on and burnout.

I fucking love this game.

Boxee & Me (and you too)

Easily one of my most favourite bits of technology in 2008 Boxee is a customized implementation of XBMC which runs on Mac OSX, Apple TV, Linux & Windows.

What sets Boxee apart from other media center solutions is two-fold. First there is the built-in plugins, which cover hundred of online media outlets including BBC iPlayer, Hulu and MTV Music among many many others.

Then their is the social aspect of the service, you can add friends, recommend media, view their activity. It’s all very promising. Boxee is currently in an open alpha state, but stable enough for use. Oh and did i mention, it’s 100% free and mostly open source.

Noise

The problem with getting an engaging, responsive audience when you’re blogging for fun is the shear volume of blogs and other user generated content fighting for attention online. If we look at Technorati’s data the are currently about 112.8 million blogs online, and over 250 million items of tagged media.

Dig a bit further into this data and it’s revealed that there are over 175,000 new blogs every day with over 1.6 million posts per day (over 18 posts every second).

There is a lot of noise out there. Chances are that there are a lot people out there saying similar things to you.

Signal

The fun part of blogging is when you get feedback, it makes you feel like the effort you have put into your post has bee recognized, and generally leaves you with a nice warm feeling. It’s also nice to know that something you have done may have helped someone in some way.

To increase the likelihood of generating feedback for you work, it is important to have something concrete to speak about. Without a clear and defined topic of conversation it’s more difficult to get a response from people, especially complete strangers you have never conversed with before.

It’s for this reason that I’m very aware of what I’m talking about, and how focused I am when I write a post. I generally try to pick a topic and stick with for however long it takes me to get my feeling or opinion across (which is why some of posts are so damn long!).

Propagation

The next important thing in trying to get a conversation going is propagation, the further you spread your message the better chances are it will be heard.

I import my blog posts into facebook for example, I also often digg my posts, I tweet about them, if I use flickr I post back to my blog (and vice versa). The golden rule I adhere to is “the more places, the better”. What I mean by this is the more visibility my blog / posts get, the happier I am.

A nice side affect of this is that I will generally be propagating my link to an audience of like-minded fellows who are more likely to engage with it.

Nonchalance

Although I try to get as much interaction out of my blog as possible, the thing keeps me from getting down when I get no comments (because lets face it, we all like to get comments, especially nice ones!) is one simple thing: i don’t care.

That’s right. I don’t care. If I get no reaction to my posts, so what? The bottom line is that this blog is for me first. If along the way I help someone out with some code or inspire someone to explore creative programming then I’m happy, but it’s not the reason I do it. I write this blog for me.

So to my fellow small time bloggers I say this: Have fun, Worry Not & Keep Blogging, Keep Linking.

What is “Personality in Creativity”???

When I talk about personality in creativity what I am talking about is the way in which individual human beings are capable of understanding, relating to and ultimately experiencing things in a completely different and abstract way from one another.

I think my understanding of this has become most prevalent in recent times, you see I bought my boyfriend a digital SLR camera for his birthday (a rather nice Canon EOS 400D) and I couldn’t help but notice that often I would find a shot or scene that I thought was worth capturing, the interesting part is that sometimes my boyfriend wouldn’t feel the same way (more often than not he would, or he was just humoring me, who knows!) It was through these continued and often random occurrences of indifference over what was considered aesthetically pleasing that I arrived at my ephinpy of revelation.

The Ephinpy of Revelation

My revelation was one of appreciation for the individual, in the same way that I would attack a pragmatic problem or a technologically challenging task from a certain perspective, my boyfriend, your girlfriend indeed your [whoever] or (especially) another person will see the same problem / aesthetic from another perspective.

It is indeed the way in which we as creative individuals are able to see, analyze, appreciate, and then (finally) form preferable, concise resolutions to aesthetically or mentally challenging problems.

I’m using the perspective of pragmatic and aesthetic creativity interchangeably, you see this is the way in which I (creatively) perceive a challenge, it is an aspect of my personality and something which is as unique in its execution to me as the very fabric of which I am formed.

The Very Fabric of Which we are Formed

This is the point, as obvious at it seems, I’m trying to make, The way I will solve a problem, the way I will view an aesthetic, even the way in which I will appreciate sound, touch, taste… It’s all unique to me. As is the way you will react to these stimuli.

As obvious as it seems to say this out-loud, I sometimes think there are a great deal of people in the world that need reminding that you should view this “with your own eyes”, be that with your actual eyes, or a perceived sandbox of conformed rationality, it should be your spectrum of creativity (or rationale) that paints the answer, not an emulated or derived palate of someone else’s expression.

“A Derived Palate of Someone Else’s Expression”

When I talk about this I’m not saying that people shouldn’t learn, be inspired by and ultimately study others work to gain a better understanding of a particular field of creative expression (far from it, indeed I believe that it is often only possible to understand and therefore form a creative expression about a given problem / aesthetic, if you have first studied and understood how peers would approach the same problem)

What I am saying is that it’s important to move beyond this. Take what you have learnt, apply it and reiterate. Your creativity will then be peppered with the nuances of your personality, and ultimately you individuality.

This drunk rambling was bought to you buy 6 pints and 2 shots of tequila. Thank you.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

And why the future of business is to be where others fear to tread

As soon as you think you’ve got it sussed, it changes. This happens every week, no, make that every day, hour, minute and second. The old certainties are gone and in their place we have rolling never-ending disruption. Oh, what’s that you say? There’s a new format for this ad or that ad? Surprise me. Nothing stays the same. We live and work in a super fast, super fluid environment where there are no rules, really.

Now, depending on your bent, this is either a pain in the arse and an obstacle, or the best full throttle, jump out of bed, greet the day with a shout opportunity that you ever got. It’s like Christmas every day. We don’t create, we invent. And what’s better than that? Inventing doesn’t require rules – they’re for people who want to know what they’re doing, who like order and the fact that everything has its place.

Creative? That’s sooo, 20th Century. Where I spend my time we make stuff, we imagine, wonder, copy, borrow, steal and cobble together. We invent. ‘How do you do that?’ ‘I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out.’ Look at that, if you mix it with this and take some of that, it makes this! If where you work isn’t like this and you’ve got a bunch of people called creatives having ‘ideas’ then you work at an ad agency, a place with rules and people know what they’re doing because they’ve done it before.

As was, creativity is the preserve of the few, its top down and hierarchical, structured and rules based. Traditional. Its old and it doesn’t work anymore. Constant disruption requires people who embrace it and feel comfortable with it. Where we work, we don’t know what we’re doing because its never been done before and in order to remain fresh, smart and ahead of the pack, you have to be inventive. It’s the ability to invent that’s at a premium. Inventors have no fear of the unknown. They like change and a lack of boundaries, Its where they thrive.

And this is where we are; we’re all inventors, media planner, art director, Flash programmer, strategist, every last one. At the edge of knowledge, technology, understanding. Here I am. I don’t know what I’m doing, because if I did I would be yesterday.

© 2007 Rob Lawrence @ Avenue A | Razorfish UK

This place, the people that fill it, they “get it”.

Do i need much more reason to like coming to work on a monday morning?

New York

In the spring me and my partner went off to New York, this was the first time I had ever to the states, and I loved it. New York is an amazing place, and I really hope we get to go again soon. Whilst we were there we enjoyed lots of touristy sight-seeing trips and ate at lots of gorgeous eateries such as Gobo and Candle 79.

Whilst in NY we also took an internal flight up to the Niagara Falls (canadian side), which was amazing, the immediate difference between the USA + Canada was astonishing, and I really hope we get to explore Canada in a bit more depth in 2008.

RailsConf 2007

After New York I attended RailsConf in Portland OR, this was on the best experiences of my life. I was my first major conference and I met some brilliant people, it was really good to meet up with lots of like minded people, and a trip the I’ve not forgot throughout the year.

I’m hoping to go again in 2008 and have yet to speak to my work about it, I just hope they will see the value in sending me there, as I have given up a lot of Rails development since working at Avenue A | Razorfish to focus more on Flex / Actionscript development, which I’ve loved, but my heart is with Ruby / Rails.

Turning 21

The summer saw me turn 21, and my gorgeous boyfriend planned the most amazing surprise fancy dress birthday party for me. It was an amazingly good laugh and really fun to see my family and friends dress up in silly costumes for my benefit.

Quitting Impact

Probably the biggest thing to change in my life this year was finally leaving the shit-hole I used to work at, Impact IM Ltd. It was the best decision I made and am glad to finally be out of there, and I wasn’t the only one to think so, nearly everyone I worked with at that hell-hole have now left also.

Impact did nothing but set me back in 2007 and made my working life incredibly unfulfilling, hollow and ultimately depressing. Just read back though some of my posts.

Starting at Avenue A | Razorfish

One of the best things to happen this year was starting at Avenue A | Razorfish, I’ve already written about how amazing they are to work for so I’m not going to reiterate that here, but I have now finished my 3 month probation and am there for the long haul.

That’s all for now, I’m off to Dubai for Xmas in less than 24 hours, so i’ll leave you with our work’s christmas card to keep you entertained. Enjoy!

What is Google OpenSocial?

Google OpenSocial are two sets of API’s; one for developers and one for owners of social-oriented websites. They facilitate with the development of building “Social Applications” for a variety of social networking websites. The basic premise is that me as a developer I can learn one API (OpenSocial) and use my knowledge of that API to build social-oriented applications for any website which is an OpenSocial “container” (has implemented the website owner version of the OpenSocial API).

The developer API consists of standard’s based xHTML + JavaScript. This is brilliant news as anyone who’s anyone knows these languages like the back of their hand. The API’s allow easy access to common social-network oriented data such as users, users friends lists, the “social news feed” and other social-graph data. The API also allows you to store small amounts of data on Goolge’s servers (such as key/value pairs) meaning that you could (in theory) build an application without having to serve the application yourself (great news if your app become popular)

Why is this Important?

The OpenSocial API’s are Google’s first steps into what they see becoming a far more landscape altering change. In recent years the web has started to evolve into a very user-centric ecosphere. People are choosing how they want to consume the information they are interested in, when they want to consume it and how they wan to share it. Take for example technologies such as RSS, widgets/gadgets and customized home-pages. These are all perfect examples of what is happening, users no longer have to visit a particular site or service to get the information they want. It is now delivered to them, ready for them to consume.

Now if you look at social-networking sites, you have masses of users communicating with their peers, socializing, vocalizing and participating in like-minded groups. What is (largely) missing from these site’s is personalization. I’m not talking about skinning or theme-ing, I’m talking about being able to consume (and more importantly) share the information users care about.

This is where social-applications come in. Leveraging social networks, content providers can enable a massive group of like-minded people to consume their content and potentially share it with yet more like-minded people. This is the massively important aspect of social-applications, in itself this gets your content to more people, fast and with instant viral appeal.

Let’s look for a moment at a typical web-savy user, let’s call him Steve. Steve has a personalized homepage full of gadgets and widgets which keep him up-to-date on things he cares about. He has a profile on MySpace, Orkut, Bebo and a profile on LinkedIn. Steve is really into photography, so when he hears that his favourite photography sharing site Flickr has developed an application for Orkut he is thrilled! He instantly adds it to his profile and starts sharing awesome photography with his friends on Okrut.

This is great for a while and as the Flickr application matures it becomes something he checks every day, constantly sharing things he finds with his friends and becoming an active user of the app. The only problem is that his only access to this app is through Orkut. He’s back to the days of visiting one place, to get one type of information. The reason it’s only available to him at Orkut is because the developers at Flickr had to decide which of the propriety social application development API’s to learn, and because they chose Orkut they become dependent on Orkut’s API to mature as their app did. They were unable to launch the app on other social networking sites because it would require re-writing the app.

So back to why all of this is important and the future of OpenSocial; Steve is getting tired of having to visit Orkut just to see he latest awesome photos on his Flickr app, he want to be able to quickly view the information on his homepage when he checks his feeds with his morning tea. Not only that but he wants to be able to share this content with his other friends that use MySpace or Bebo and also his business acquaintances on LinkedIn… Enter OpenSocial.

The first problem that OpenSocial solves is the issue of portability, using OpenSocial Flickr are able to write a social application which will run natively on Orkut, MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn. With absolutely no extra work their application will work on all of the social-oriented websites that Steve uses. This is brilliant! The more places Steve can use this application the wider the reach.

What will be important for OpenSocial in the future (and something which Google today said was the long-term plan) is convergence. Imagine if Steve is able to share content he cares about with ALL of his friends, regardless if they are on MySpace or Bebo, Orkut or LinkedIn. This is a massively significant aspect of what Google hopes to achieve with OpenSocial. Take this a step further and imagine if Steve could now embed a micro version of this application on his personalized homepage. Now steve has access to this content, and the distribution aspects of it from the place he visits the most. The whole concept could be taken another step further, with application like Google Desktop, Dashboard Widgets and Adobe AIR applications, integrating with these different frameworks (all of which run native xHTML + JavaScript) he now has access to this content online and offline. You can even take it another step further still, Steve could access these services on his mobile phone whilst on the go.

So, by utilizing an open, standards based approach to developing applications for social-network sites Flickr has multiplied the reach, access and viral aspects of the content they deliver through this application exponentially. It’s easy to see why this is so important, if current trends are anything to go by, the web as we know it is getting more and more user-centric, do we really want this garden-walled approach? Applications exclusive to certain separate mega-sites with little interoperability, or do we want the content we love wherever we want it, whenever we want it with the ability to share it with whoever we want? More importantly as developers do we want to launch an application to 5 million potential users on one website, or 75 million potential users across 15 websites, giving them easy access to the application from wherever they want?

Errr… What about Facebook?

You may have noticed that I neglected to mention the largest, fastest growing social-networking site out there in this article. The problem with Facebook is that they have already developed a propriety API for developing applications. Granted they were first to the table late 2006 with their FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) API’s for developing Facebook applications.

The problem with these is the fact that they are propriety, and writing you application within FBML’s limitations (FBML is a subset of HTML) means your application will only work on Facebook, unless you re-write it. This is not good for the future of the open and social web (now I see where the big G got their name!) and means masses of extra time and effort for application developers.

You could argue the point that this isn’t an important thing at all, and that OpenSocical will never really take off because of Facebook’s dominance. That might be true, who know’s what the future holds? However, I’m willing to bet that both consumers and developers alike will want their content in more places, with easier access. If I were at Facebook I would seriously consider either bridging the gap between Facebook and OpenSocial, or consider implementing an OpenSocial container for Facebook.

Work

We’ve been watching Prison Break lately and I have to tell you, it’s amazing. Watching this group of people struggle to escape from a prison resonated with me because I handed my notice in the last day of July and was trying to convince my work to let me leave after a month instead of three.

Well things got tough, then they got nasty, then they got ugly, there was threats made, angry “i hate the world” days and lots of general struggle. Eventually though things got better and I realised I was approaching this the wrong way, I got my act together, spoke nicely and what do you know, it worked.

Last friday (7th August) was my last day at Impact, this wednesday (12th September) is my first day at Avenue A | Razorfish. I’m really excited, if not ever so slightly nervous (like shitting ‘em nervous).

I did a ‘dry run’ today, which basically consisted of going to London, walking my route to work, coming home. Sounds kinda dumb but I get lost incredibly easily, so I figured it was important to get this straight in my head…. OK and I went to the apple store.

Facebook

Everyone you know is on facebook right? Well it seems that way sometimes, it’s great though, I love facebook, I’ll be honest I really do love it. I even have FMenu running! The more the merrier.

The problem I’m starting to notice is the direct consequence of something I thought was so amazing when I found out. When I first joined facebook, f8 hadn’t happened, Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t got up on stage and announced the facebook platform, there was no public FHTML or FSQL.

The platform seemed excellent, wow I can develop for facebook? really? me? that’s awesome, I can use either my existing app or some purpose built thing and instantly tap into a rich user base of millions.

It all sounds so lovely.

Problem is there is nothing but crap out there, the applications being developed for facebook are shit, ugly, horrible pieces of work that are unusable, lack quality and serve no real purpose.

That’s a bit of a sweeping statement, and there are some great little gems out there, such as My Profiles, a great little app for adding links to your other online profiles, Graffiti Wall is another awesome app, really fun.

But there are so many more apps which are really poor quality, and they are generating masses of information spam, before the app development stuff I used to check my fb for updates in my news feed and would be able to see at a glance what everyone is up to, now it’s a sea of icons and links begging me to add this app or see this gift or view that tattoo or whatever. And I get really fucking pissed when it lands in my email inbox.

Another problem is the more people join fb from places like MySpace the more popular these apps will become, look at the Top Friends app, a direct lift of MySpace’s top friends list.

I guess there is no real ’solution’ and that is one of the problems with opening it up to anyone, look at MySpace are these people really web-designers? No. (yes, I know they are expressing themselves, blah blah blah). On the flip side are the people creating apps such as ‘water-fight’ really developers? No. Should facebook be opening it’s doors? Yes. Should facebook vet applications for quality and usability? Yes.

Context

This is just going to be a quick one, but it’s an old net classic, context. You see it in the forums, you get it on IRC, even your text messages aren’t safe from it.

Context, or lack-thereof should I say. It amazes me how easy it is for context to be misunderstood when reading written word, and that has just happened to me. I’ve pissed people off because they misinterpreted the context in which my comments were made.

I’m really upset and disappointed because the uproar of it all was really hurtful and I honestly didn’t think this particular person was like that at all. Oh well, time is a healer I guess.

the past few weeks have bee a bit insane, work has become progressively more crap than even i thought impact could possibly become. it seems as though the people who ‘get it’ and are trying to make things go as smoothly as possible are shat on, and it’s just not fair.

i had my annual (not that i’ve even had one yet… in 2 years) review not to long ago, and it was… well it was confrontational, absurd and ultimately made me realize that impact isn’t somewhere i want to be spending my time and effort anymore.

you see the problem is i was promised a review of my contract and salary upon return from railsconf, it was the only reason i was going to railsconf. for me it was recognition from my employer that the immense amount of effort and dedication i have put into impact over the past 2 years was going to be fairly rewarded (at this point i am still not earning what my original position was advertised at!). in my two years at impact i have helped change the way the new media department works completely. when i started sites were built using font tags and tables! all software was stolen, illegal. designers were developers, developers were shit at their jobs. it was a mess.

two years later and we have a clear separation of design and development, all of our software is legit, our hosting solutions are top notch (and saving us thousands) we have a brilliant project manager (love you babes) and things are really starting to work properly. and of course all of our work is clean and lean semantic XHTML and CSS, everything is usability and accessibility tested and the maintainability is greatly improved.

back to the railsconf promise, a few weeks before going i was made to sign to contracts, one stating that if i leave the company within 18 months of the conference i am to pay-back the full cost of sending me there. and another to increase my notification period to 3 months.

i signed them hesitantly because there was no mention of my pay-rise in either, and i definitely felt there should have been. i raised the issue with my immediate boss and was promised that it’s nothing to worry about and upon my return my contract and pay packet would be reviewed as previously discussed. i decided to trust this as i had pretty good relationship with my my boss and didn’t think he would be able to lie to me about something like that.

biggest. fucking. mistake. of. my. life.

turns out he has no problem lying directly to my face. a week before leaving for portland i’m told that i won’t be getting a pay-rise. now i’m pissed. really fucking pissed.

so back to my review (are you still following?)

i raised all of these points and more in my review, and was basically told (paraphrased):

the past is in the past, deal with it. if you want more money you have to prove yourself.

oh and not forgetting:

if we lose job X and job X i blame you entirely.

half way through the review i checked-out, mentally gave up. fine, i thought, fuck it. i don’t care anymore.

i obviously hadn’t proved myself enough in two years of dedicated work, and was clearly the sole reason for a jobs partially flawed execution (couldn’t have possibly been that the head of client services was less than cooperative in briefing the job in correctly and maintaining a level of communication on the job)

in fact the only thing that has been proved (to me) in two years is that i should have left a long time ago. impact doesn’t ‘get it’ the thinking is all wrong. they’ve come from a print and design background and are trying to make noise in the new media world with the wrong attitude and the wrong management. the best thing they could do would be to remove the input of a certain md from far away (i’ll let you work that one out) and replace the so called department manager (haha) with someone who has actually even done the job and isn’t just a salesman with a scary delusion that a team of 3 people in the nowhere of marden can actually take on a job from playstation.

so back to my news (we’re nearly there i promise)

i’ve been job hunting (obviously) and have some great feedback. i’ve decided to accept a job at Avenue A | Razorfish, the largest interactive agency in the world. i had one interview in the pub which went amazingly well, then another a couple of days later and was offered the job on the spot.

the thing is aa|rf ‘get it’, the management have all been there and done it before, the process is streamlined, the client services team understand how to brief a job in (because they only do digital) and more importantly the culture is amazing, people are given time to develop their skills.

when i told my new employer about the way impact nm runs, they laughed, then were really shocked. they could see i would go nowhere at impact and have decided to let me grow at their place.

i’m gonna miss the people at impact, but not the management.

better things await me. and i hope the remaining nm staff realize that impact will probably never ‘get it’.

since railsconf a lot has come to my attention in professional life, my working life. things which have had an effect on me, my faith in people and my ability to commit.

i’ve been thinking an awful lot lately, and i think the time has come for me to take a serious look at my career, and make some important decisions.

at the moment i don’t feel like i’m happy. if ruby has taught me only one thing, it’s that happiness is more important than money, deadlines, clients, bosses and commitment. if a person doesn’t feel happy doing what they do, they shouldn’t do it.

the problem in my situation is that it wasn’t always this way. the company i work for has some brilliant people, and i have been happy here for so long now. but recently the happiness has dropped dramatically and in the name of staying true to myself i have to make some difficult choices.

the downward spiral to all of this is complicated, and i’ll spare you the specifics, suffice to say that appreciation, and a fair workload, with realistic expectations and fair rewards are factors which have been below par for a long time, with no immediate sign of improvement.

so here i am, the eve of turning 21, about to change my life?
time will tell.

Work

Work is still there, still too much work, not enough staff. Interesting things may happening here soon. I’ll post more when I can. Seem to be doing a lot of guttering related websites.

In the world of freelance projects, I’ve got this nice little flash / rails project ticking over, after some delays with the first payment (reminded me why I’m no longer freelance full-time, I hate chasing money) the project is back in full swing, and I’m really enjoying it. My Ruby knowledge has really helped make this flash project one of the cleanest in terms of actionscript, lots of object-oriented goodness.

Personal

In my personal life things are nice, me and my boyfriend are going to New York City at the end of march for 11 days, I’m really excited, I’ve never been to america and of all the places in the states NYC has always seemed the most attractive to me (I’m a natural born city-dweller you see)

We have pre-ordered our PlayStation 3, we will hopefully be getting one on launch day, along with some extras (games, remote, cables extra controllers etc.) although the price tag is a little bit scary.

We finally got a proper stand for our in-you-face-fucking-huge TV (50″ plasma). ikea is fun.

Music

In no order what-so-ever I am so loving the following:

• Jamie T
• Lady Sovereign
• Death Cab For Cutie
• Cold War Kids
• The Fray

Also I have discovered that vinyl is amazing. so fuck you.

Coming Soon

Hopefully if a post a list of things I want to write I will write them. i’ll give it a go.

• the goings on at work
• new york
• vinyl

that is all.

I’m sure there’s some valid business reason or some sort of financial excuse for this way of working (it does after all make sense, why spend 2 peoples time on 1 job when you can spend 2 peoples time on 2 jobs ) but even so, it just doesn’t feel right. A lot of the time it feels like we’re working in a factory. It’s boring and repetitive, like so:

• Job comes in
• Someone gets briefed
• That person works on that job, alone until it’s finished.
• Rinse
• Repeat

Working in this way generally means that on a job per job basis people’s time is split between 2 or 3 different disciplines, take for example my recent rails project; I have a certain amount of time in which to do it, but that time is taken up (so far) with design work in photoshop. It’s not that I’m useless in photoshop or anything, it’s just not where my focus needs to be on this project. Ideally I would have got my rough ideas down in photoshop and then given those to Ian to do his magic with, freeing me up to work on more important things such as coding.

Another huge problem is lack of man power, we have 2 people full time in our little internet team. 2 people, thats less than piss poor, it’s fucking shit. We easily have enough work to keep 3 or 4 people going, at the very least another person would help take away all the amend based jobs from myself and Ian, oh yeah where I work we have to deal with various amends and updates to existing sites, as well as tackle our own huge projects (which we’re working on solo remember) we don’t have a junior that can just deal with these little annoyances.

It’s all basically very demotivating to me and I just can’t help but wonder what shade of green the grass is on the other side. Maybe I should find out?

Their decision was that the site needs to stand the test of time, and in theory could still need to be updated / worked on 5 years from now, meaning that if I wasn’t working for them in 5 years they wouldn’t have any in house ruby people to work on it, or they would find it difficult to find an external company capable of picking up the work.

So instead our external programming people are going to be picking up the job, they program in asp.net, and unfortunately working with them often presents numerous problems. It’s a real shame because from them we only ever get the same ‘base code’ with chunks added on, all of the sites I have done with them have been frustrating and demoralizing.

I’m upset because my version of the site was to be a bespoke CMS based around the needs of the client, nothing more, nothing less, it’s been planned so that the CMS is 100% tailored to their exact needs. With these other guys doing it, well I’m sure it’ll be far from my vision, and very far from the clients expectations.

I guess I’m annoyed because i’ve made my feelings towards my position in the company crystal clear, I want to migrate more into programming (so we can program in-house) and away from design. This seemed like an ideal opportunity for us to launch our first rails site, and I’m positive it would’ve been far better for the client than anything the other guys can come up with.

At least in a few weeks time when it’s all done, full of bugs, off spec, design all over the place and the clients can’t understand / don’t want to learn how to use it, at least then i’ll be able to turn around and say “i told you so”

It could also be down to the fact that a lot of the older sites here, the ones which were designed / developed before the arrival of myself and Ian Weir (awesome designer guy) are pretty horrible, like really really bad. more on that another day.

I guess just having to actually spend time looking at these sites, and having to go in there and edit the god awful code is really really depressing. another factor has got to be that nearly all of our clients seem to be really boring, like gardening things and other such inspiring subjects.

what I’m really looking forward to however is a great project i’ve got coming up which involves melting about 5 sites which are all a mix of flash, html into one big Rails powered mega site.

I’ve been itching to get my hands really dirty at work with something like this and I can’t wait. My only concern is that I’ll end up being distracted every couple of minutes to answer stupid questions, and to make more of the above mentioned mind numbing amends to sites I hate. I guess I can live in hope that the powers that be realise that I am but one person with one attention span, and when I’m programming it’s the code which need’s my full attention, not anything else.

maybe it’s because i feel i have nothing to say, maybe it’s because i’m scared of expressing my opinions, maybe i don’t want to write a “personal blog, i guess i could be scared of offending someone… I think the real reason is that i’m maybe just too lazy, or too tired, or just to full of excuses not to.

whatever it is, just asking the question has given me something to talk about, i guess the clever thing now would be to take this personal, self-reflectional question and somehow apply it to some greater debate, write a really really good blog entry.

i’ve always had a love/hate relationship with blogging, the thought of having my own blog, the design process, the building of the tempaltes, the skinning of the engine, the million different plugins i end up sourcing to make my blog sing the way i want it to, yet every blog i’ve ever had, i get to like 80% done, write a few entries then forget about it.

I’m going to try and make a real conscious effort not to let this blog fall by the wayside like so many others, I’m pretty confident i can do it, but i guess only time will truly tell.

So there it is, my first blog entry on what i hope will be a long running chronicle of my life, work and all the in between bits.