Richard Walker

This is becoming habit forming. Once again, it’s been an unforgivably long time since my last post, and quite a lot has been going on, and I simply have no excuse for my absence! In the last 6 months:

• I left a venture I was a part of. With my workload mounting up, it simply wasn’t viable for me anymore and I was putting too much at risk.
• My old work buddy Carl, in cooperation with a colleague of his, launched Dealush – a service designed to connect consumers with great local deals, and to help brick-and-mortar business participate in the online coupon deal wars.
• I moved back into my old New Farm office, where I was renting a desk from Salt Print. I am subsequently about to move out again, as the loft apartment above my garage is now vacant, and is 50sqm of perfect office space.
• I continued doing large amounts of work for Firstfolio, my biggest client.
• I started lending a hand in earnest to Holistic Page, who are about to take the book sales market in Australia in an exciting new direction.
• Egypt, Tunisia and Libya exploded into widespread revolt, apparently because the youth of the Arab world are, quite frankly, sick of their elder’s sh*t hangups baggage childishness. Perfect.

I’ve also found a brilliant new application (which has been around for a while now) that I use every day – Coda, by the brilliant folks at Panic.

Coda (image used without permission - hey, it's a free plug!)

Frankly, it’s brilliant. It combines the ever-so-indispensable usefulness of Transmit with the power and beauty of a top-notch text editor. Sorry, TextMate… you’re brilliant, but after 5 years, you’ve been trumped.

I’m also eagerly awaiting news on the next iPhone and iPad. As long as it comes with Angry Birds, I’ll be happy. If you don’t know what Angry Birds is and you have an iPhone or iPad, I strongly suggest you click this.

So, moving on… the new office. It’ll be fantastic to have so much space available again, and I plan on turning over a bit of a new leaf once I have all my hardware in there and set up… namely, fixing a few minor oversights with backups/redundancy, and adopting some solid (yet agile) development methodologies, specifically continuous integration. The problem is, I need a CI solution that’ll allow me to handle development, testing and deployment across a few different languages – namely PHP, Ruby and Python. I’m working with two frameworks in there as well, CakePHP and Rails, both of which have their own unit testing/deployment goodies, so I need something that’ll help everything work together as One Big Happy Family.

Anyway, once the new office is all set up, I’ll be refreshing this site with a new layout, and a section dedicated to my office setup and hardware/software deployment. It’ll be fun! I promise.

It’s been a while since an update. Needless to say, I’ve been a busy chap the last few months… the work I’m doing with my Sydney client turned a particularly busy corner, alongside gearing up a new business so I’ve essentially been buried up to my eyeballs in work!

Exciting new developments though… I have an opportunity to dabble in SAP.

I’ve also set up shop in a shiny new office in the Brisbane CBD. It’s taken the better part of 4 weeks to get naked ADSL installed here (cable guy should be arriving….. 8 minutes ago) so it’ll be nice not to run up my 3G bill.

Probably the coolest thing I’ve seen all week is Panic’s status board. Panic make a brilliant FTP client called Transmit… amongst other products that I haven’t explored yet.

Panic status board

Seriously cool.

But is it really necessary?

YES.

A status board like that would make a such a difference in any development environment. Being able to see at a glance who’s doing what, what people are saying, live updates of a product’s uptime/downtime… given the opportunity, you could fill a wall with live data about your products, and it wouldn’t be wasted space.

I’ve seen the classical whiteboard setups, but you always have the problem of people not updating it because they don’t have 5 minutes free to run to the whiteboard, or someone accidentally wiped out an important note or somesuch. The whiteboard has had it’s day.

While flitting around the Panic website, Coda has caught my eye… I might have to look at that.