Reflecting on a return to action

I have now been with my new employer - EMC Consulting - for four weeks and to be frank, I now have a lot more of interest to discuss on this blog. So, I thought I would re start my posting here with some thoughts on these first four weeks.

I have spent the last fourteen months working almost exclusively on a large and complex JavaScript application and I wont deny that I did learn quite a little bit during that time. But I still find myself glad to be back working with all of my skills in a more balanced fashion. Its been refreshing to see how much people care about UX and accessibility and it is a pleasure to be able to combine that with my passion for high quality and minimal CSS and HTML code.

Already, pragmatism has reared its friendly head and is guiding my path. This is something I have to reacquaint myself with and I am enjoying that process. There is little to rival the feeling of writing code to fulfil a purpose, getting it done and working and moving on.

Yes, I now have to fix IE6 bugs again, but at least I am able to do so in the shadow of Borough Market and the delights that can be found within!

Recent times

I am sure you will have noticed that posting has been light on here the last few weeks and I thought it might be interesting to talk a little about what I have been doing.

I have spent most of my spare time working on JSquared. The code base is coming on nicely now. I have completely re-written some parts of it even since the latest release and I am getting close to being code complete for the next version. Some more demos will come soon as well, but you can get more information on that over on the JSquared blog over the coming week or two.

Recently I have achieved the status of Certified Scrum Master. This is something about which I am very excited. I believe that Agile with Scrum is a fantastic engineering process. I have seen it in action myself whilst I worked at LBi and I am actively looking to assist Betfair in making the transition to this process. It can be painful and without doubt we are not yet getting it right, but with time, I am sure we will.

Now that I am officially certified, I feel more able to push things forward with Betfair and I have gained a great understanding of the process. I even think that I might bring some of the principles to my "normal" life, though I am not sure my wife will like a daily scrum meeting!

Hopefully I should be able to work on some more exciting things over the coming months than in the last few and I will be sure to blog about any and all the exciting happenings in the world of Betfair. For now, it seems I am far more an observer than participant in this great interface development world in which I live and work.

What do you use?

Every now and then I like to play with some new tools. Try a few Firefox plugins, maybe a new dev environment. This week is one of those times.

So make your recommendations, what do you use that is cool and why?

Just to get things started and to pre-emptively give something back, I have recently been playing with Spotify which I can recommend as a great way to listen to some new and old music.

I have also been playing with XUL Profiler which is a pretty cool Firefox plugin (a nightly of Minefield works best with it I believe) for profiling your JavaScript and analysing how much work the browser is doing to render your page.

Now its your turn...

Twitter

Twitter is something I never looked at until very recently and for some reason I have suddenly decided to use!

So rather excitingly, I am now on Twitter and you can follow my antics (or whatever I bother to say on there) at http://twitter.com/nortools.

I hope you have as much as fun reading as I do writing.

Happy new year

I wish you all a (slightly) belated happy new year.

2008 was a tough but amazing year. Some of its highlights for me included getting married, having an amazing honeymoon and having 3 different jobs!

Some of the less good parts included having 3 different jobs! I am working harder than ever now at home and at work and have had much less time in the last 6 months to blog or work on JSquared than I would have liked.

But things can change for 2009 and so I hope to only have 1 job this year, not get married again (as amazing as that was) and give a bit more time to blogging here.

As you can see on the JSquared blog, work has resumed on the project after a period of quiet and I have a new team member on board to make the project even better and an even bigger success.

This is hardly going to be a quiet year though as I hope to move house - here's hoping Mrs N and myself can find the right place!

I hope you all have a happy, healthy and successful year and keep reading....

A rant

I have tried hard not to fill this blog with random off-topic rants. I am about to break that rule. If you do not wish to read my rant, please move on - normal service will be resumed shortly.

There is some (tenuous) relevancy about this rant. I will mention user interfaces!

My rant is about iPod's. No no, sorry, its about iPod users and iPod headphones.

I use an iPod. I use it because it was given to me and is 8Gb whereas my MP3 player of choice (a Creative Zen Stone Plus) is only 4Gb. It is a 3rd gen nano and is truly wondrous to hold and behold. I find the sound quality lacking in comparison to the two Creative players I have had, but it serves my needs adequately.

I am not such a fan of using the iPod. I often find myself getting frustrated at the imprecise and slow controls - I just want to move to a position within a track and change volume without waiting for the interface to allow me!

Anyway, I was sitting on the train this morning - not listening to my iPod - and the woman sitting next to me was listening to hers with the rather poor, but iconic iPod headphones.

She felt she had to have the volume turned to maximum just to be able to hear her music through those rubbish and very leaky headphones! This resulted in the whole carriage "enjoying" her music along with her. And I got the brunt of it.

In short - if you have an iPod, buy some decent headphones!

</rant>