oodavid... what a blog you have!

2011 has been a bit of an odd one so far; it saw the end of my startup phase and the rebirth of my freelance career. I want to outline the chronology of the year up to now, talk about the future of oodavid and work into a few “freelance lessons” blog posts, so without further ado:

5th January 2011

Following a few face-to-face meetings with the founder of happiest (whom I met at my charity event in 2010) it is explained to me that as 1DayLater is only 2-people it will only go so far, and that I should join his exciting new team as a Director. I wholeheartedly agree!

Over the next few weeks I wind down my involvement with 1DayLater so that I can get my teeth into writing an API for happiest.

January - June 2011

Fall into a nice routine in the happiest offices; start early, finish late, be punctual, work some weekends - usual startup routine really :-) Over this period I write the API that now powers the happiest platform. Not a lot to say that you can’t imagine; it’s a startup, we do startupish things, technical achievements are made, releases are pushed etc etc etc

23rd June 2011

After a short morning meeting, it is decided that I should leave happiest. I give my keys and say adieu. Why am I asked to leave? To this day I’m still unsure.

Over the next few days I mull over the situation and come to some realisations:

• I was in a perpetual state of being made a Director - “the lawyers are in next week” etc.
• I was only paid £500 twice - “startup survival invoices”
• I still had 2 unpaid invoices
• Nothing was in writing - every meeting was one-on-one with no witnesses, over the phone, never by email etc.
• All of my code was on their servers

Ultimately I deem the first half of 2011 both a success and a failure - SUCCESS! The work I did at happiest was some of the finest of my life - FAILURE! I was duped into giving away my time for essentially free.

Last week of June

I speak to several lawyer associates about my situation and they all have the same thing to say: firstly a sigh of “I’m really sad to hear that”, followed by “ultimately there’s very little you can do, did you leave a back-door in the system?” 

Apparently the legal recourse would be arduous and expensive, but anyhow I am a stickler for the Programmers Code of Ethics; even if there was a back door I wouldn’t use it (there isn’t so don’t try). Petty revenge vs. reputation?! I like my reputation thank you. You live and learn eh?

Next up I realise that time is of the essence; no point in thinking about happiest now, money is tight at this point and I need to get the word out that I’m back in the game! In 6 hours flat I design and upload a new oodavid.com, knock together a quick tumblr blog and start Tweeting and emailing again - it feels amazing :-)

After this I make a promise to myself - no more startups, time to be the finest freelancer I can be! The last time I was a full-time freelancer was in 2006 and I did very well for myself, but as a 21 year old with no real experience of the world my freelance career was held up by brute force, my technical abilities.

So I make myself another promise - become a master of law and finance as a freelancer, for my health and wealth!

July

After putting the word out in June that I’m available for work I am inundated with offers, leads and even requests to join some other startups. I politely decline the startups and get talking to the offers and following the leads. In the between time I research and write up terms and conditions, legal timelines, cashflow logic, monetary projections and the nuances of dealing with bad customers. I must say that they are beautiful; a little symphony of documents that (when used as intended) sing a most calming harmony :-)

By the end of the month I have signed a 1-week-per-month retainer with one of my old clients - this seriously stabilises my cashflow for the foreseeable future. I start, complete and get paid for 2 small jobs which stabilises my current bank account a little.

August

The start of August is primarily concerned with a 3-week job; to create an easily-integrated ”Job-Bag-System” for local Ad Agency AdMast. This is a most enjoyable project; essentially a fancy online file manager with multiple file upload, drag and drop functionality, previous versions and the finest feature of all NON-BREAKING-FILE-LINKS. Meaning if you update, rename or move a file, your application will still have access to it via a bridge table. AWESOME.

The second half of August is spent in Devon with my gorgeous girlfriend and her family. There is no signal or internet. Life is beautiful.

September

Returning from Devon I hit the ground running: follow some leads that appeared while I was away, clear the email backlog and almost immediately take the reins for my Dad’s company for the duration of his honeymoon (2 weeks)

Sadly I have my first encounter with late-payments which harks all the way back to June, and that was an invoice with… sure you can guess it… not to worry though, my journey has since showed me something called the Late Payment Legislation, and it’s statutory! Ahhh, the law; you are most excellent :-)

Now and the future

Well here we are: I am 5 days into a very lucrative project which has a great potential for further work; I am working with my Dad and brother again, my finances have been balanced in a manner that will see me out of debt in about 6 months; my legal situation is much better; I have a new flat that has a view of my favourite part of Newcastle; I live 200 metres away from the girl I love. Quite honestly, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been happier - and I’m one of those stupidly optimistic people!

Edit - pretty sure that’s a self-fulfilling feedback loop of optimism and goodness

Blog Posting Uncertainty

I wasn’t entirely sure whether to publish this article but I concluded that if one person can learn from my mistakes I’ll be a better person for it :-)

An idea to add wishlists to your savings accounts to act as an incentive to save. As you deposit money into the account and pass over monetary thresholds, text messages are sent to you saying something like:

“now you have £40 in your account you can afford a new Jumper! Reply BUY to purchase :-)”

Idea - LloydsTSB Savings Account Wishlist from David King on Vimeo.

For years I’ve kept “ideas books” as a place to jot down my observations on how to improve things, create new scenarios or even just little thought-puzzles and whatnot. Looking back over them is always quite amusing; some have aged really well and some I’ve seen come to realisation at the hands and minds of others - awesome!

Flicking through the first few pages of the filthy one (2005-2008 I think) I see:

• Home energy monitoring kits
• Kinetic mice
• Cashflow projection software
• Super-SImple-Phones
• Stockmarket ideasAn idea for a heist (yes really)
• Audio synthesis interfaces (I have a real big soft-spot for this one)
• Laptop “unfucker”
• A page entitled “when I go to the pub I want to see tea and coffee on draft”
• A game concept called “life” which starts as a sperm-based scrolling shooter / race and evolves with each stage of life
• Artificial Intelligence in Audio Production
• A logic game called cub3
• Open-Source music (applied to a business model)
• “A time and a place” idea to traverse music throughout time
• Charity concept called “giveback”
• Etymological language browser

and then some

I’ve come to the conclusion that some of them will likely be unattainable by me and so have decided to find the right company for the idea and will pitching it to them in a short video. I shall immediately write another blog post for the first “pitch”…

In my lunch break I get to CHOP-CHOP-KNIFE-FOOD-ATTACK

which turns into some tasty Egg-Fried rice

YOM YOM YOM!!

Hello *nix nerds!

So this morning (yes, before breakfast) I awoke the beast of a poota to see a terminal tailing an error log. The tail command with -f flag outputs any changes made to a file, which is well handy to see live errors on your logfiles etc. So if you run something like this in your terminal:

tail -f /var/log/mysql/error.log

you would see any mysql errors as they happen, which is pretty cool, but you have to keep a terminal open, switch to it to see the errors etc, which lets be honest is a waste of clicks!

Back to this morning, I decided that I wanted my errors piped to a notification service and came up with:

tail -n0 -f ~/Documents/LOGS/adlink.co.uk.error.log | while read line; do notify-send "adlink.co.uk.error.log" "$line"; done

which pushes changes to the notification area, it’s visually lovely:

but quickly becomes a pain-in-the-arse for files that are active as each message must wait for the previous to disappear before appearing - resulting in an amazing amount of waiting. So I dug a little deeper and discovered a little program called osd_cat, with which I wrote this command:

tail -f ~/Documents/LOGS/adlink.co.uk.error.log | osd_cat --pos bottom --offset 33 --color black --delay 10

which as you can see is a bit more nerdy and changes are reflected immediately and layered ontop of everything - perfect!

so what are you waiting for nerds? GET ON IT

EDIT - I knocked up a bash script that will tail all the error logs within a directory, so I now run this at startup:

#!/bin/bash

# traverse the directory
for filename in *
do
	# what's the filename?
	fname=`basename $filename`
	# if it's an error log
	if [[ $fname == *.error.* ]]
	then
		# tail the file and pipe it to osd_cat
		echo $fname
		tail -f $fname | osd_cat --pos bottom --offset 33 --color black --delay 10 &
	fi
done

exit $?

Extra nerdy++

I’ve been pondering today about how the quickest and easiest way to test-drive different fonts, like hundreds of them, on a website… tinkering with the fontsquirrel and google fonts libraries I found myself speccing up a browser plugin / extension based around this piece of code:

$('head').append('<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster+Two&v1&v1" />');
$('body').css('font-family', "'Lobster Two', arial, serif");

…as you can see, if you dumped this into into the console on a site with jQuery it will switch out the font assigned to the body allowing it to cascade down through the DOM.

Which leaves me with the question; would it be productive to write a chrome extension where you can select any of the freely available hotlinkable fronts and apply it to a website? I think it would! Weekend project here we go :-)

Beer first.

I recently came across a most excellent video from Mike Monteiro (Web Designer Guru) focussing on the topic of getting paid by clients. It takes a very legal approach (his lawyer is with him onstage) and covers various topics such as kill-fees, your rights as a freelancer, using Intellectual Property as leverage for final payment and introduces several scenarios that are all too familiar with much of the audience.

The talk is a contributing factor to my ever growing interest in the legal processes of working freelance or in a small company; My “shitlist” for next week includes creating a legal timeline along with supporting documents, contracts, terms and conditions; I’m even speaking to awesome designer Graeme “grabbins” Metcalf about designing a gorgeous one-page infographic that illustrates the process. It’s gonna be gorge.

I have always loved Jesmond Dene more than any other part of Newcastle and I’m no so proud to have it as the view from the new home and home-office. I won’t be getting bored of this anytime soon!

Not just on the grounds that it’s a beautiful place, but it’s also my cycling playground where I like to fall off my bike into mud. No really I seem to do that more than anything else there…

Being a bit of a non-designer, if I want to add a quick bit of “wheee” to a page I sometimes put my ribbon titles onto my h1, h2, h3 etc tags in order to make them pop a little bit.

But until submitting my entry onto CSS1K using such a technique I hadn’t realised that it was considered such a neat trick; I guess you just never know what you’re sitting on!

So the trick is wholly inspired by Nicolas Gallagher’s pure css speech bubbles; however I use 2 pseudo-tags instead of 1. Whether you’ve read and assimilated that link or not, lets code

<div >
	<h1>This is my title</h1>
</div>
<style>
	/* Just to align the container */
	#container {width: 400px; margin: 30px auto; text-align: center; padding: 100px 0; background: #EEEEEE;}
	/* The important bit */
	h1 {position: relative; margin: 0 -25px; font-size: 40px; background: #0088AA; color: #FFFFFF; text-shadow: 1px 1px 0px #1A5D6E; box-shadow: 0 0 10px #AAA;}
	h1:after,
	h1:before {content: ""; display: block; position: absolute; bottom: -25px; width: 0; height: 0; border-style: solid; border-color: #1A5D6E transparent;}
	h1:before {border-width: 25px 0 0 25px; left: 0;}
	h1:after  {border-width: 25px 25px 0 0; right: 0;}
</style>

And BOOOOOM; ribbons with no extra markup. Awesome. Just tweak the numbers for different sizes, and view the inspiration for the logic and workings (it’s not my place to take credit for that!)

Hello world¹.

After a 6 month stint with social startup happiest² I find myself re-kindling my freelancing career, before I can begin touting for work I have a rather long list of due-diligence that must be completed, the meat of which comprises of:

• Update oodavid.com to act as my portfolio
  something quick and succinct, with testimonials and a call-to-action
• Update my legal documents and contracts
  I’m making some changes on account of recent lessons learned 
• Formalise my agile processes for new clients
  I used to work on an ad-hoc basis which is fine when working with decent clients however the past 3 years of startup culture has brought agile to the table, awesome
• Rebuild my network of freelances with whom I can rely on
  I last freelanced over 3 years ago and my little black book does no justice to the excellent freelancers and talents that I’ve encountered in my time away

I’ve given myself a fortnight to complete these tasks and I’m looking forward to each and every one of them! And with that I must big you adieu, I’m ahead of schedule and am starting to plough through my legal documents. Awesome… 

1. All coders have to write that on a new blog, just the way it is :-)
2. I’ll be writing about my work at happiest in another blog post in the future :-)

When designing interfaces for the web, a lot of people use the 960 grid system or something similar as a layout system. Loving numbers as I do, I have π tattooed on my arm after all, I decided to explore the reasoning and logic behind the much adopted 960 system.

The 12 column layout that is core to the system is a highly composite number ie. it has a large number of divisors; 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12 even columns to be precise - AWESOME. So this means when you go about designing your layout you have a great deal of flexibility and choice - ♥ MATH.

Short and sweet blog today as I am moving into a new apartment! It’s a lovely place on Osborne Road in Jesmond, more on that later :-)