It’s been a while between posts. Here’s Why:
I’ve been on holiday for two weeks! It’s been pretty good.
I spent a week in Ohakune, in the central Plateau of the North Island of Naw Zealand and another week in Russell, much further north. It was awesome to get away from Auckland, but I’m ready to go home.
I have spent my time organising my reading list for the upcoming year (scheduled for reading are gems such as Code Complete, Continuous Delivery, The Fundamentals of Security and The Mythical Man Month). I’m excited, I’ve got about 60 books lined up for the year and I can’t wait to get stuck in.
The Christie Marceau Charitable Trust
I’ve also spent a good deal of time helping out with the trust. The woman who runs it is a good friend of my mother in law. The trust needed a refresh of their website and to consolidate the digital presence they had.
They were paying $300 a year for a bunch of services they didn’t need (part of the package they had gave them 50 databases! 50 databases and one website
- what a hilarious way of making it seem like your product represents value for money to those who don’t know any better. Honestly the state of web hosting in New Zealand makes me feel angry. So many people who don’t know better are getting fleeced by these companies who, at the end of the day, provide a poor service simply because competition in NZ is so abysmal).
/rant
Anyway, I rewrote the trust website into an angular site with a bunch of content, realised it was as ugly as sin and enlisted the help of a talented designer named Walt. He helped me out with the design, I cancelled the trust’s old web services package and the new setup is super simple. I ditched Angular, hosted the page on github pages (TY GITHUB) and now the trust only needs to pay for the domain name every 2 years. It’s a solution much better suited to the actual needs of the trust and I’m glad to have been able to tailor a solution for them. It’s a timely reminder that what is simple for people in the tech industry often isn’t for people outside the industry. A timely reminder for me to stay humble and focus on how I can help people rather than how I can make as much cash as quickly as possible and screw the needs of the person I’m representing (looking at you Free Parking ಠ_ಠ). The new website is fairly basic at the moment but it’s functional and thanks to Walt, it look good. I’ll expand on it content wise throughout the year, I hope to post fairly regular updates on it though that will depend on the trust having news to share!
Overtime Tech Talk
I’ve taken some time out to draft a post and presentation on Overtime and how exactly our technology fits together, it’s still in the works but for those that care, I haven’t forgotten! I promise!
That’s it for now, time to hit the beach!
