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!

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’.

i’m going to quit the internet. yep. thats right.

well no, actually that’s a lie. but i am in love with serif fonts all over again.

monospace turns me on.

lolcatz are teh godzizez.

mondays suck.

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?