PIE
Professional, Inspirational, and Entrepreneurial.
They are the the things I inspire to be, the items I wish to draw your attention to, and that I hope you'll find here.
Hopefully that this site contains knowledge, information, and inspiration you can draw from.
I have licenced all of the content under the Creative Commons GNU Lesser General Public License with a belief that this provides enough freedom for any end-users.
If this is not the case, please do get in contact with me.
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With the new year I have a few resolutions, a few issues, and a few solutions.- Managerial. Potentially Prince2 certified?
- Assistance. Through charities, and creating useful online RIA's or utilities I hope to spread knowledge, and reduce time it takes people to complete tasks.
- Knowledge. Whether it be through reading RSS feeds daily, going to conferences and talks, or by talking to fellow developers inside and outside of work.
- Entrepreneurial. Aiming to launch, create, or demonstrate one new innovative tool, service or application every 6 months.
Once upon a time...
Oddly enough, I haven't always wanted to be a Flash developer, a designer, or a involved in the Internet in general.
My first career choice was a games developer. An industry that I may attempt to break into in the next 2-3 years if i burn out.
Having played games religously since I was 13, I started to get a more involved in the community side of things.
This provided an extra experience on top of my passion of gaming. I become involved in a few game modification websites; apppointed a moderator of one forum to assist in knowledge sharing and management of users.
I then went on to release many third party tools and addons (skins, maps, scripts), many of which are still used today.
Over the past year I had created tools to make my life easier.
Small utilities such as
- In-game WinAmp control, allowing me to view songs information, album art, play/pause, and skip songs.
- A small unobtrusive in-game clock.
- MSN Messenger contact list, allowing me to see when who was online.
A year of the same game, every day after college or school, and you start to hug the top of the leader board quite often. The challenge dissipates.
I started to try and create an unfair advantage between myself and my fellow gamers. I used to get a kick out of their reactions, an adrenaline rush from adding another layer to the game.
Never really caring about my own score, or the winning. The adrenaline rush came from others using my utilities, and enjoying them.
The options I kept adding to my utility such as a new crosshair, gave me a slight unfair advantage. The reactions from others pushed me to take this further.
Having researched into DirectX, C++ and game engines in general over the past year to create the aforementioned utilities it wasn't hard for me to create other advantages.
See through walls and foliage, removal of fog, static crosshairs, automatic aiming were just a few of the features I implemented.
My tools where downloaded over 18,533 times as of 08/02/09.
Another successful use of my time was an ad-supported match organizer, news aggregator and a countdown clock for the 2006 World Cup.
The application was used in over 54 different countries around the world and provided news, goal alerts, match reminders, match and team calendars all within a simple small desktop RIA.
Originally created as a native application, predated the Adobe AIR technology by 2 years but used the same concepts and paradigms.
Inspiration, motivation
Before my first job at Fingal I had just took a year out to complete a college course, a Master CIW Designer certification in fact, the year long course was basic and ridiculously outdated. Using 2-3 year old software, and techniques unused for 3 years, I traveled to London, Oxford Circus in the hopes it would prepare me for what lay ahead in my working life.
Unfortunately the course was nothing like it should have been. I completed the course within 6 months, which is half the allocated time I had to complete the course and in hindsight, the course was a waste of time.
I finished the course, and I had applied for over 600 jobs, and had only been invited to one interview, as a PA to a CEO.
Apparently I was too experienced for the PA role, and yet, I was too inexperienced for the web developer roles. I had no commercial/agency experience under my belt, and no one was willing to give me the chance to receive the experience.
More than capable of fulfilling the roles I was applying for, and still no opportunities were presented to me, I tried for a further 6 months, until I gave up and went back to school.
Starting back at school felt like I had just wasted all that time.
It was a big knock to my confidence.
Fingal, not just a cats name.
After a month of being back at school, I received a response, and subsequently an interview with Fingal Creative Communications in Fulham.
I jumped at the opportunity, and so of course, I purposely arrived half an hour early. I wanted to explore the area, prepare myself mentally, and mostly to ensure that the TFL transport system (total farce) wouldn't cause any delays and ruin the opportunity that had presented itself.
The interviewer, Seyoum Abay, was also the guy I had been in contact with earlier, and who had seen potential on my curriculum vitae.
After the interview I was set a challenge to create a HTML page using the design, assets, and tools provided to me on a prepared laptop. I completed the page within the allocated time, using W3C web standards, and had a few minutes left until Seyoum would be returning.
So I set about with some search engine optimisation and adding Meta data to the page.
A week later I had my second interview, with Jason Loader (the creative director), the interview was more of an impromptu chat, but I wasn't complaining. I had got the job.
Few months into the job and I had already progressed from HTML newsletters, and change requests to real web site work.
Maybe because the change requests, which were suppose to take all day to complete, were being completed within a few hours. I don't think I was there intended employee when they hired me.
I was hungry. I wanted to learn. I was eager. And I learnt quickly.
Shortly I was starting to show my entrepreneurial, and innovative side, creating tools, and utilities to speed up my work, and the processes.
Innovation
One of my duties was to alter text, images, and add new sections to the Silverstone web site, as the original site wasn't managed via a content management system.
The process was usually as simple as, the client calls the account manager, who puts the change into an email. The project manager puts the request into a document and forwards this to me at the beginning of the next day.
I would then create a list of all changed files, and send a "work completed" email back to the project manager.
I don't know what inspired me, or what triggered this, but I after work on night, I spent my evening creating a prototype application. A native Mac and Windows application.
The applications purpose was to streamline the change request process. Manage, document, screen shot, and archive all change requests.
It also allowed the end-users to communicate, and comment on each change in real time, as any instant messenger was banned at the time. With all relevant conversations being tagged with meta data, and archived for searchability.
John Brown Publishing == John Brown Media
In 2007 Fingal was purchased by a company called John Brown Publishing, which later renamed to John Brown Media (more on this later).
Subsequently I created another further set of tools that would streamline our processes, reduce expenses and reduce time taken to complete tasks.
A newsletter management system, was an in-context CMS, that would have integrated with the Sign-up.to system, unfortunately it never came to that point in development.
This allowed our account managers to directly input text, and images into predefined newsletters for our clients, without having to resource in a designer, developer and project manager.
Thus reducing time, expenditure and maximizing the ROI for our clients.
Another tool I prototyped was the cross browser, cross domain, change request system. Allowing the clients to access a CMS overlaid on to of their site, in a similar manner to Adobe InContext Editing.
John Brown was an interesting experience.
During 2008 John Brown was contracted to work with RedBull on the RedBulletin F1 web site.
A normal project, that resulted in lies, failure, a bit of a mass exodus and a rebranding strategy from “John Brown Publishing & Fingal” to simply “John Brown Media”.
I won't divulge the reason the projects failures, as I don't want to damage anyone's career.
But it was a horrible experience, that engrained the following into my mind;
- “Process, process, process.”
- Emails are incredibly important for both future reference and to cover your team.
- Never say no to something, unless you can provide a logical reason (understandable by non-technical people), and alternative solutions.
- Don't be afraid to say no to designers, project managers and account handlers if their is absolutely no time for frivolous design and functionality changes.
- “If something is worth doing once, it's worth building a tool to do it.”
- “Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a maniac serial killer knows where you live.”
Where am I now?
Well, I'm currently at AKQA, which is an agency you may have seen in the news lately.
The global ideas-driven agency, was featured in news broadcasts and newspapers all of the world due to their christmas card this year.
I'm currently working in the London office with the Creative Research and Development team, as a Creative Developer.
AKQA is also the agency where both Tristan Celder, and Sean McSharry came from, both mentored and taught me everything I needed to know about Flash and ActionScript; so I'm in good hands.
Creative Developer?
A creative developer, in my opinion, is someone who enjoys and practices;
Using technology to realise creative visions
High standards and best practices.
Working within a technology agnostic mind set.
Using the applicable processes, technologies and languages.
Innovative, while practical.
Design and process orientated atmosphere - the olive branch between designers and developers.
The web site
Whenever I find something inspirational, exciting, informative, or interesting I'll be posting it on this site.
I'm hoping to post a lot more, and definitely post anything that is informative, such as tutorials and snippets.
Originally this site was created using WordPress as a back end. But over Christmas time I spend my time off from work building a PHP code library, and this site is the result of it.
I plan on adding a better interface to the back end content management system, and eventually open sourcing it under the name LyfeFramework:PHP along with my AS3 code library LyfeFramework:AS.
Inspiration, motivation, mentoring, and life
There are many people I owe my career to, and that I respect.
It would feel wrong not giving them the thanks that they deserve.
Tristan Celder, and Sean McSharry for getting me into ActionScript and for teaching me everything I needed to know. Not just ActionScript, but also the process orientated decisions, managerial aspects, freelance advice & information and for ingraining the idea within me that you should always use the most applicable technology to reach the desired effect and audience.
Seyoum Abay and Michael Boateng for giving me the opportunities and knowledge that they have taught me. They both helped me see the social phenomenon occurring on the internet in a different light.