Recent happenings
Jul 28th
I have been a bit quiet for sometime as things have been a little up in the air as to exactly what I am doing. Things have finally settled down now and am slowly forming a plan for the next couple of years.
For a number of reasons I have (temporarily) moved back down to London. At this stage I think I will be here for around six months but am not 100% sure yet. As always God has graciously provided me with a really good job, this time at the BBC where I am working with a great team, learning a lot and being presented with some good opportunities, ideas and ways of working – all of which will help me to be more effective when I get back on the case in Newcastle.
Unfortunately I don’t have many more details at the moment. If you could continue to pray for me and Gods guidance in my life that would be much appreciated.
Week fourteen review
Jun 17th
This week was somewhat plagued with bugs! Not completely a bad thing though as now they are all fixed. Very frustrating though and it is annoying when you can’t see much visible progress.
On Tuesday I had the chance to go to an apprenticeships conference with Alan Sugar. It was quite interesting and has given me some info I can hopefully use in the future.
Received some interesting news on a building I may be able to work from but it is not 100% yet.
Week twelve and thirteen review
Jun 7th
Had a good few days off with my brother last week. We drove all over Northumberland looking at castles and checking out Hadrians Wall. It was a lot of fun. The weather was perfect and it was a great reminder of how beautiful England is in the summer. I really needed the break but it was hard to get back into work afterwards!
ZAVAM has been slipping a little, mainly due to a couple of changes I saw as absolutely necessary before making it available. While not all the functionality has been implemented I want to do my best to make what is done rock solid and it seems to be fast approaching that status! In other news the website is now available so you can go check it out and see what it is all about – zavam.com.
Week eleven review
May 24th
Another busy week working on ZAVAM. It is now 95% ready to go into beta! Just a few niggly problems left with the hosting provider (Amazon EC2). Should have them sorted by the end of the week though and I am hoping to make the service available to pre registered users (you can register here http://beta.zavam.com) from Saturday!
I also got a chance to meet up with Robert Lavender and talk about some projects as well as get some handy tips for working with drupal and a few contacts from where I can get some work.
My brother is coming this week so I won’t be getting so much done – which is a good thing. I really need a break as I am pretty worn out!
Week ten review
May 18th
Not much to update with this week, just been working away and getting a lot done. ZAVAM is starting to look very good. I have most of the features I need to launch with done. It is just a matter of fixing up a few things and making the experience a lot nicer. It will be available for beta testing at the end of the mont so if anyone wants to try it out send me an email. The requirement at this stage is that you are currently using S3 to store media and your bucket(s) are located in the EU.
Week nine review
May 10th
I sent off another proposal this week. It represents a much more scaled down version of the plan which I think is going to be much more realistic in the short term. It is also for a foundation I would really like to work with so here is hoping that they catch my vision.
I managed to get a demo together for one of the applications I am building. I would like to give you a name for it but we don’t have one yet.. and I am not sure I should reveal too much about what it is at the moment. The first version of this should be ready by the end of the month. Then we will be building up some content for it and I hope to launch sometime in June.
Another project I am working on does now have a name – ZAVAM. This is quite exciting, it is something I have been thinking about for the last few months and I am stoked to be working on it. It is a media sharing application kinda like flickr or smugmug but I have some interesting value adds that really make the whole experience of sharing media easier. This should be in private beta by the end of the month.
In addition to these two projects (which take up all my time as it is) I have taken on another project, this time as more of a project manager but I can see that I am going to have more involvement than just that. It is a website to promote evangelism and outreach events across the country before, during and after the London Olympics in 2012.
I am basically working every waking hour at the moment – which is fine because I love it, but it is kinda tiring. As always I appreciate your encouragements even if is just a quick email.
Answers to prayer
May 9th
There have been some testing moments over the last few months. Moving to a new city by yourself is apparently not the easiest thing to do. It never really crossed my mind that it was a big deal but people are often amazed that I have done it alone.
One of the things I have been trying to do is to rely on God for my strength. When I am having a hard time, when things aren’t going how I expect I take it to him. The cool thing about doing that is that I a. don’t have to worry about it anymore and b. he sorts it out!
For instance. The first week I was here and looking for a flat to move into. I had something very specific in mind but I was unable to find something that was quite right. I even increased my budget but even being prepared to spend more would not have bought me what I wanted. So I told God that I needed him to sort it out because I really didn’t know what to go for. Not long latter I was thinking about one of the places I had seen. I had written it off because it wasn’t really what I wanted and in fact had some negatives. I thought it was strange that I could suddenly be thinking about this place I had written off. It seemed like God was trying to say something to me. When I get into these kind of siutations I have been trying to just go for it and see what happens. So I called the agent having no idea what I was going to say. I told her what I thought of the property and that I didn’t really want it because it didn’t really fit my requirements and had some negatives. A figure came into my head and I told the agent that I had an amount I would be prepared to pay but I didn’t want to make an offer of that much because it seemed unrealistic and a bit cheeky. I told her and she agreed and said she wouldn’t go to the vendor with that amount. So anyway we talked for a while about it and about how I would pay which turned out to be a problem because I have no employeer. At that point the agent said well, if you can pay up front then that would be fine – and in that case I would present your offer as well as the vendor would more likely be ok with that. So that is what we did and they accepted. I got a real bargin on this place and actually it has turned out to be great!
About a month ago I was stressing a bit about my financial situation. While I had money in the bank I could see when it was going to run out and I was worried I wasn’t going to get work and be able to pay my way. So again I told God he needed to do something about it. Not long later I had an agent contact me about a job in Glasgow. I am always interested in what work people want done so I talked to him about it for a while and found out it was paying even more than I made before the ecnomoy caved in. He was very enthusiastic that I was the right person for the job and I was seriously tempted. There where some problems though. The job was 2.5hrs away, and it was for 9months. For a shorter amount of time I figured I could do it but that was just too long to get sidetracked for. So I said no I couldn’t do it. To give some perspective taking that job for 9months would have given me enough money to survive on for another 2 years. It was hard to turn down that kind of security and I had ideas flowing about all the ways I could spend it! The next day I really felt like I should ask my accountant what my financial position was. I was slightly shocked to learn that I owed WAY less in tax than I thought. In fact enough to keep me going for another 6months!
You could probably say these things are just coincedence but based on my experience it seems that if I trust something to God he will sort it out. I think I will keep doing just that.
Week eight review
May 3rd
This week I have made some big strides in two of the products I have been working on. The schedule I have planned out is quite ambitious and I actually wasn’t sure if I was going to get everything done that I had planned this week – but I did, yay!
There are a couple of really interesting things I have done this week. I am planning to use Amazon Web Services so have been learning how to create images to run in EC2. I now have a customised Ubuntu image setup and has Mono and MySQL installed and on startup it automatically pulls the latest version of my application from an S3 bucket. This actually turned out to be a lot easier than I expected and is pretty cool to hit a button and have a new server starup and start running my app.
The other cool thing I now have is a couple of scripts for installing mono. It will download the appropriate tarballs, extract them, makes and installs them. This took a lot of work to figure out everything that was needed and tweak the script so that it worked. It is the first shell script I have ever written so it was a good learning experience.
Week seven review
Apr 25th
A pretty good week productivity wise. I have gotten a lot of work done on this new application in fact am slightly ahead of schedule. I have also been doing some planning for another application I am working on in partnership with a friend. Details will come on these soon.
Due to my change of financial position I have had a bit of a rethink about the most effective way to get started. I am quite happy with the approach I have come up. It is low cost and very focused on investing in only a few individuals.
Two main issues are left to sort out before I can start. I need to approach some of the organisations I have been talking to to ask for some referrals. And I need to find a building where we can work from.
I may – in fact I hope to end up working out of our church building but that has not yet been aquired and may be June before it is. In the meantime I am not 100% sure what I am going to do. Looking likely right now is that I keep working on my projects and try to build a revenue stream and also do a little youth work during this time.
Developing for the cloud
Apr 22nd
The project I have been working on will be living in the so called cloud. Eventually it will be hosted within Amazon EC2 but I am not quite at that point yet.
I have been using Amazon S3 and SQS however. I am developing in c# so went looking for some libraries that would make things easier. I am not so keen on working with SOAP or dealing with http calls, especially if someone else has already done the heavy lifting!
For S3 there is ThreeSharp it has a very nice API and thankfully uses an interface that can be mocked. One of the nice things about it is that you don’t have to provide an actual file to upload to S3, you can just provide data that can be loaded into the stream. This makes it really easy in tests to load it up your bucket with data. I now have a nice suite of end to end tests that work directly with S3.
The next library I found was Amazon.SQS as with ThreeSharp it has an interface that can be mocked. The API is fairly straightforward, the only thing I had trouble with was figuring out how the Queue Url worked. When you create the queue the url is returned in the response object and from then on you need to pass that url around when you make requests.
I was expecting it to be easy to work with these services and so far I have not been disapointed.
