business
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.
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.
Week six review
Apr 18th
Most of this week has been spent working on my secret new application. It is coming along well and I think I have a realistic timeline in place. I have started using Redmine for managing features and timelines. It is very cool, much better than trac. I haven’t managed to get SVN intergration working yet though.
I also spent a day playing with Alice. I was using it on Ubuntu and could get everything set-up but I couldn’t get playback to work. So I ended up using it in a windows vm which worked ok. I am not sure if it is the best introduction to programming though, it is kinda cool to see objects move around the screen and to change camera angles but it is quite a bit of work to get that going and I am not sure if that is suitable as an intro. I have come across another game building app called Game Maker so am going to give that a go. Also I think Alice might be a bit abstract. There doesn’t seem any real purpose for it, whereas with Game Maker it seems pretty clear that you are going to build a game. I think purpose is important here and I am sure building games will appeal to teenagers!
Other news is that I found out my tax bill is going to be a LOT less than I initially thought. This is going to give me a lot more freedom and I am going to have to have a rethink about how I approach the next few months.
Week five review
Apr 11th
Well a short week this time and not so much to update with, The most major news was that the application to Learning Launchpad was not successful. Not a problem though there are plenty of other grants to apply for like this one which is all about inspiring young people, sounds like a perfect fit to me.
Other than that I have been working on an application I am going to sell online. It is going pretty well so far and at least it now seems much more feasible. I am hoping to have a version ready for private testing by the end of April.
I haven’t done any billable work this week which is a shame but I have been fielding a lot of calls from agents, so I might pick up a contract for a while. That will relieve some financial pressure and make things a little easier while waiting to see what happens with funding.
Week four review
Apr 4th
Another fairly good week, didn’t do as much as I would like but it has been pretty good nevertheless.
After a marathon two day editing session and with a lot of help from my friend Sara, I finished writing and submitted my first funding proposal to the Learning Launchpad. I will find out in a couple of weeks whether or not I get through the first stage of screening, if so then it is off to interviews which will be fun! I normally like interviews but that is usually job interviews. We will see how this goes!
I also got a big chunk of work finished for Simon. More excitingly though I have been working on some ideas for products to launch. One idea is pretty much complete and am going to start work on it this week, the other I am still talking with a friend about but could be quite an interesting!
Week three review
Mar 28th
Well this week started with disaster! I spilled water on kate (my laptop, yes I realise it is sad and slightly disturbing that she has a name) and after leaving her to dry out she wouldn’t start up! I have sent her off off for repair now and it is going to cost a lot to fix. I lost a little data (a video of my trip to Japan that I was putting together) but most of it was safe thanks to Jungle Disk. It also sent the start of my week into turmoil as I had just gotten all the software set-up so that I could start work. Luckily I still have my old laptop – now pushing six years old. So Monday I spent getting everything set up on this computer. Everything is working well now, but it is so slow which can be frustrating.
Tuesday I met with three organisations that work with youth in Newcastle and got an absolute wealth of information. From experiences working with the youth to how to raise funds and how much to expect. Everyone expressed support of what I was doing and were keen to work with me once we are up and running. It was a very encouraging time and it is quite likely that I will get referals from these people so I can get some youth into my course!!
I have also spent a lot of time on the funding proposal I have been writting with Sara. It is looking pretty good now, still a few more tweaks to make before the Tuesday deadline. As well as this I have written some briefs about the company and one of the products we are going to launch. I am working towards getting a website and material together in order to promote what we are doing.
It hardly seems possible but I also managed to get a lot of work done on an application I am building for Simon and am rediscovering my passion for programming. It has been a lot of fun!
Well looking back I have actually achieved a lot this week. At the start it hardly seemed possible. In fact I had a brief moment when I felt the weight of everything and I thought I wasn’t going to cope. At this point I realised I had a choice about how I was going to approach the week. I decided that the cirumstances around what were happening were not going to stop me from completing my mission. I know I am in the place that God wants me and with his strength I am going to complete the task he has assigned. I have never felt so empowered in my life. This is going to be an amazing year!
