Unfortunately, the company suffered financial problems, and I left in 2004, shortly before the site was taken down. The internet archive’s wayback machine has allowed me to go down memory lane and see the site that I made all those years ago.

The wayback machine has archived over 150 billion pages, dating back to 1996, so there’s a good chance there will be an old version of a site of your choosing. Simply type in the URL in the input and click ‘Take me Back’.

Incidentally, the site used tables for layout, some CSS for typography, colours and element widths, Flash and the Windows Media Player plaugin for previewing polyphonic ringtones. Funny to think how far both websites and mobile phone technology has progressed in the last few years. Technically, the site served ASP pages, with content generated largely from a custom content management system using XML and COM objects.

Overall, it’s been a good year. My background as a software developer is with Microsoft-based technologies such as Visual C++, and since 2003, .NET and C#. Although my technical mainstay is still .NET, this year has seen me work more and more with open-source, PHP-based solutions such as CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I’ve continued to work with WordPress, and in the second quarter, completed Biking for Bones, a site for my mother-in-law, who rode over 3500 miles in aid of the Arthritis Research Council.

In April, I also had the opportunity to do a project using Adobe Flex. Whilst I’d had a little experience with ActionScript and Flash, this was the first time I did any significant work with Flex, and found it to be an interesting platform. I used WebORB for .NET for back end communication. Although I enjoyed the work, I missed working with good old HTML and CSS, and although some things are undoubtedly easier to achieve with an RIA platform such as Flex, I would argue that javascript libraries such as jQuery make many behavioural paradigms almost effortless.

The latter part of this year has seen me working on a company logo for Fresh Click Media. The aim is to integrate this into a new design for the site, and use the new logo as a focus for business cards that I’m also currently designing. I’ve been toying with the idea of ExpressionEngine for the site, but I’m very fond of WordPress, and it does what I need; I don’t share the opinion that WordPress is a CMS, though it’s a bloody amazing bit of software.

For many people, 2009 will be associated with financial instability and job insecurity. I’ve been fortunate enough to have escaped the downturn this year, but despite many positive predictions for 2010, feel that we’re not out of the worst of it yet. Fingers crossed.

I haven’t achieved everything I wanted in the past year, but I’m okay with that. You can’t plan for everything, and this year has brought some unexpected events that have had an effect on my professional plans. Despite this variation, one thing remains unchanged – I am passionate about what I do, and consider myself very lucky to be doing something I love. If I were religious, I’d be thanking god.

I’m looking forward to 2010. In the short term, I’m going to be working on a redesign for this site and producing those business cards. The longer term aim is to develop Fresh Click Media as a business and win more client work and contracts.

Happy new year to you all!

The vast majority of these emails are essentially spam. Despite me entering details about preferred location, experience and daily rate requirements on job websites, I often get mails that are for the wrong end of the country, junior jobs and low rates.

I just got a mail from a recruiter that contained the following text:

Dear Shane

PUT PARAGRAPH ONE HERE

PUT PARAGRAPH TWO HERE (Or delete if unneccessary)

Put PARAGRAPH THREE HERE (Or delete if unneccessary)

{Name of person removed}
Microsoft .net Consultant
{Name of agency removed}

I didn’t feel the urge to deal with somebody who needed reminding that an email can be separated into separate paragraphs, and that if it contained less than 3 paragraphs, the unneccessary (sic) paragraph helper text should be removed.

Unbelievable. Still, at least they got my name right.

I picked up a paperback version and here I present my thoughts.

Until a couple of weeks ago, had someone mentioned Lulu, I’d have thought of the Scottish singer (pictured), but a post over at Zeldman.com introduced me to self-publishing site Lulu.com, where anyone can publish their content for a worldwide market. Cool – I thought, but didn’t expect to be purchasing something from the site any time soon. A couple of days later, and a visit to FreelanceSwitch revealed their new book about Freelancing, How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer was published on Lulu.

Having always loved books, I ignored the PDF version, and plumped straight for the ‘hard’ copy, perhaps ignoring the rather steep price of £19.29 for 216 pages. I’d banked on the book’s website heritage to produce something that could justify me spending that amount of money. I did have some reservations about the quality of the book itself, and I did draw some parallels with tip-style books that sometimes appear on gaming magazines.

Payment on the Lulu site was seamless, and within a few days, I received my copy of the book.

Initial impressions were good – although not ‘full-size’ when compared to traditional technical books I’m used to, it felt pleasing in the hand.

I approached the book from a beginner’s standpoint – I was hungry for knowledge and reassurance about my new freelancing lifestyle – and not surprisingly, I found the book’s writing style and content to be very similar to that of the website. I have seen some other reviews of the book that give the book criticism because it is a little too close to the website’s content, and that the book is merely a collation of the articles presented on the site. Although this might be a downside for some, I consider that good content is good content, and hey – I still like books.

A testimonial on the book says that freelancers of all experience will gain something from the book, but I feel that it is mostly suited to those with a minimal amount of experience. Freelancers who’ve been around for a while may feel cheated by the book’s price.

A positive point is that the book clearly explains not only how to succeed as a freelancer, but how to make the change from full-time job. Other areas of note include:

• Branding
• Choosing a place of work
• Getting off the ground by securing projects
• Project scope and timing
• Pricing your work
• Tracking hours and milestones
• Working with clients and dealing with disputes and problem clients
• Invoicing and getting paid
• Marketing your services as a freelancer
• Expanding your business

A preview of the book can be found on the Lulu website.

Overall, I feel that it is a worthwhile read and gave me lots of tips and confidence with my freelance ‘plan’.

Good points

• Friendly, informative writing style
• Good coverage of a wide range of topics
• Best suited for beginners

Bad points

• Price is too high for many
• Experienced freelancers may not gain much

Many years ago, I spent 6 months in India. For the first three months, I was staying at a rural polytechnic in Uttar Pradesh, and I tried to learn some Hindi for my own interest, and because I felt it would help me settle in and go some way to befriending the mainly non English-speaking people in the area. Some of my fellow travellers felt no need to make an effort, and insisted on saying English words more loudly and slowly. Funnily enough, this doesn’t really work.

I make this comparison to people who bring coding style and standards from previous languages. I’ve recently been working on C# code that screams of work from a former VB programmer. There are prefixes to all the variable names to indicate their type, constants are capitalised, method parameters are prefixed with additional information as to whether they are passed by reference, and members are prefixed with ‘m’.

public const string cstrDataGridXml = "DataGridDetails.xml";

public EditableTable(string p_strTableName,string p_strTableDesc, bool p_bExtended)
{
	mstrTableName = p_strTableName;
	mstrTableDescription = p_strTableDesc;
	mbExtended = p_bExtended;
}

I find this type of thing mildly infuriating – it’s like going to India and shouting English. To bring this old coding style to a new language blurs the distinction of coding standards between languages, the very coding standards which are established because of language features. To mix the styles blurs this distinction, and reduces the clarity and purpose of those coding standards.

I come from a C++ background, and although I don’t touch the stuff these days, you can bet that if I returned, I’d be coding as I did back in the year 2000. Now I’m doing C#, I use those the standards defined by Microsoft, who, to be fair, should know a thing or two about C#.

Having started Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I code Ruby like a Ruby programmer – so you won’t find any m_ prefixes for member variables or such like. Perhaps one day, another Ruby programmer will look at my code. If it’s styled like Ruby, their understanding and comfort in reading my code will be maximised.

This naming also extends to control prefixes in ASP.NET and WinForms. Drop a TextBox onto a web form and by default, you’ll get TextBox1. So why change the prefix to txtBox?

I think it’s important for developers to respect the language they’re programming in, and code accordingly – although the exact content of a coding standard for language ‘X’ promotes contention, a mishmash surely doesn’t have any advantages.