10 month catch-up
Amongst us freelancers and small companies, its said that the lack of blog posts is a good thing, it means you’ve been “too busy” to take the time to write. So I’m not going to complain about that.
However it is something I intend to remedy this year. I’d like to focus more on this website as a method of continuing to improve my craft. One of the downsides of freelancing and working at a frenetic pace is having less time to experiment with code, design and emerging standards or best practices.
Which is why I’ve I’m going to make time for a realignment and update of this site. I’m always reading about developments and many times I’m lucky to get the opportunity to practice them on live projects but there is something to be said for doing it on personal projects where the risks are less. You can make mistakes without having to worry about them affecting commercial customers and their users.
So what have I been up-to for the last 10 months?
I had a brilliant time working with the wonderful people at Code Computerlove for most of 2011, its one of my favourite places to work and one of the best digital agencies in the UK. I feel honored to be continually asked to work with them, last year I helped a large team of designers, project managers, user experience architects and developers rebuild the website(s) for Oxfam UK. It was a grueling task, at times stressful but always fun.
There were lots of technical challenges working for such a large organization, they came with different needs and requirements from most of the jobs I’ve worked on but the team I was working with were so talented and friendly that it make it fun.
Working with the very talented Andrew Brandwood, we developed a module front-end system of HTML, CSS & JavaScript components that the application developers could use to build the site. I learned more than about development reusable components for large scale and high traffic e-commerce sites.
With the time I had left I worked with Studio Skylab on some nice site builds. I also had the pleasure of working with Building Blocks for a few weeks, helping them with some front-end tasks for Butlins and other high profile clients. I’ve worked on some things that sadly I’m not allowed to talk about in specifics, some mobile-web development work and some character illustrations.
So all in all, professionally 2011 was brilliant. Huge thanks and love go out to all the people I worked with.
This year I will be sharing an office for at least the next six months (and hopefully more). I’m lucky to be sharing with the very talented Jono Brain, Mark Holt, Stuart Preece and Andrew Doran. Work wise I’ve been asked to do some mobile web-development and responsive design for a large niche content site so lots to learn and get through. Hopefully blogging and writing along the way after inspiration to do so from my recent trip to the New Adventures Conference in Nottingham this month.
