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Dec 1 2014

Bye bye hotels.com

So once again I’m moving jobs after being offered a role that I’ve been looking for since leaving Mozilla and having my 2013 summer holiday; I’m going to be the Head of Front-End Development at Possible Worldwide. After nearly 10 years of being 100% hands on I’m looking forward to start taking a couple of steps back to be able to think about how front end development can best integrate and contribute to a company and clients on going development as well as building out my team of devs in London and remote offices.

tl;dr

  • Building a responsive website onto of an existing (and profitable) desktop website has been an experience (both good and bad)
  • Am really looking forward to put into practice some ideas I’ve had over the years aimed to making my dev team feel great and do great work
  • I’m looking to recruit a lead dev to join me in the Front-End team, if you would like this to be you get in touch!

Nov 9 2014

Healthy

I’ve been out and about in recent months at some awesome events (MozFest and Full Frontal) which has again put me in touch with some fairly amazing people who I’ve certainly not seen as much as I would have liked to and in general they’ve all asked me the same thing – “so what did you do?”. It’s always a question that I struggle to answer as I certainly did do a lot and at times I never can never really remember them all so while this may not be everything I hope there might be some interesting things in here for everyone to pick up on. Read more

Nov 14 2013

1 Comment

Why wouldn’t you use HTML5?

At work we’re about to start on a nice big project. The plan is to take our current codebase, strip out a ton of the cruft (the kind that grows and grows when the same code base is worked on for multiple years), improve the performance (due to various reasons JS has been turned off for IE7 users) and introduce a new front-end architecture based around data-contracts delivered from the back-end that are then parsed via our front-end templates. Our CSS and JS will be structured into neat and tidy modules loaded in as and when required opposed to loading in EVERYTHING at once as we’re going mobile-first in our design and development and care about our users because we’re nice conscientious developers. But we might not be using HTML5 (structural elements). I’m not totally sure how I feel about this. Read more

Sep 29 2013

4 Comments

The summer of fun

I have had a day of clearing my head as today is my last day of being unemployed. The job I said I had lined up is starting tomorrow and after a whole summer of ‘slacking off’ (or relaxing as I think most other people call it) I’m actually looking forward to getting back into a slightly more ‘normal’ routine and office banter (and socials) again. But what have I actually been doing, and where will I be working from tomorrow?

tl;dr

  • I’m starting work at Expedia/hotels.com – I’ll be working in their offices in London (Islington to be precise)
    • having not really touched a computer in anger over the summer I’m hoping I can still remember how to code
  • I have continued losing weight – 20.8kg (45lbs/3.2 stone) lost and body fat percentage (down 11% from where I started)
  • fitbit says that I have walked over 920 miles
  • my mum has undergone rather major but what looks like very successful surgery to remove all visible cancer
  • I’m no longer feeling depressed

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Aug 8 2013

5 Comments

All the good updates

It was just over three months ago that I got diagnosed with diabetes and heard that my mum had cancer, news that topped off my most recent bout of depression and left me making the tough decision to leave Mozilla to try and get myself a rather better daily routine and ultimately to start feeling good about myself again. And as of today things seem to be taking a turn for the better.

tl;dr

  • I have lost around 16.6kg (36lbs/2.6 stones)
  • my blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol levels are now that of a normal, healthy 30 year old
  • fitbit says that I have walked over 500 miles
  • I have a fantastic sounding new job lined up
  • after 3 rounds of chemo my mum has an operation booked in up which the surgeons believe they can remove the bad stuff

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