I’m losing faith in the design of my website. It looks dated. I’m not really sure what to do with it other then give it an overhaul. But that requires coming up with a new look and feel. It requires implementing that. But muh effort, Muh time constraints and other such excuses of the weak willed.

I’m going to learn about design.

Rather then just minimally modifying a template, I’m going to look at every piece of this website and give it some love and attention. It’s been quite neglected.

I want to focus on creating something that is minimal, contemporary and clean. I like white space, I like strong borders and well defined blocks of content. Turning that into an actual design will be interesting! Until I know more about what I want to achieve and how to get there, I might have to be content with making a few structural changes and a few CSS tweaks here and there.

Project Updates are important.

I need to go through the groups within my site and update them in terms of content as well as design. I’ve done a bit of work, had a bit of a play with different technologies, as well as submitting some interesting university assignments. I need to throw that work up on to the projects section so it can be consumed!

My skills and Experiences have also changed.. slightly

I should update that section to reflect the work I’ve been doing recently at Spark Ventures around continuous integration and deployments. It’s technically interesting, requires technical nouse, involves communicating with dev teams, creating and changing work flows and managing the expectations of the product teams, development teams and bigger fish higher up in the Spark Ventures food chain. It’s been fun.

With the publication of this post, I’ve changed the font from Junction Regular to San Francisco - because I love the OS X El Capitan font that much.

What a difference that makes:

My name is Alex. I’ve no idea if anybody will read this, it’s more for my own sanity anyway so that’s fine!

I’m a student at the University of Auckland, currently working over summer as an intern for Spark Ventures. I’m loving being back in a real job. Don’t get me wrong, University is great, but the amount of time I wasted every day sleeping in until 11am because I didn’t have class until noon, was ridiculous.

I hope to populate this blog with revision notes from my classes, once classes start back up, as well as passing comment on anything and everything, as and when I see fit.

This is the first post so I will end it here, with this sweet picture of a a place near and dear to my heart.

Gulp is what I’m using for builds, the output of gulp’s build process is piped into a folder that I’ve set up as a nested github profile. BrowserSync handles all of my testing and content iteration, it’s amazing. To get a post onto the live site or make some other change, all I have to do it write it up, check it looks right using BrowserSync and then git commit -am "Of course with a sweet commit message" from my prod folder. Yes there are extra steps that I’ve introduced, but that allows me to make big changes with multiple commits, iterate and push to test as much as I like, without the risk of omnishambling my live site. It’s pretty cool.

Technical things aside, my boy Toby is nearly 5 months old. Time flies. I’m working full time at Ventures, it’s awesome. Super glad that I did the Summer of Tech programme when I did, else I’d still be working at the liquor store. That would be a grim existence indeed.

I am technically still at Uni. The longer I work in the tech industry though, the less relevant Uni becomes and thus the more difficult it becomes to stay engaged in my studies - especially when still no course I’ve done past CS111G has actually been useful for work. It’s maddening.

It could be a lot worse though, my amazing son and beautiful wife are keeping me honest, in an industry I love. First World Problems indeed

Be patient when changing domain name. This site was down for most of the day today because I was an impatient prick.

Be patient!