Contracting Advice

6th December

In August I moved to London and have been solid at work on a contract basis ever since, so I thought I'd write some comments on contracting in general for anyone considering it.

All in all I'm really enjoying the world of contracting, the mix of working with large clients in a larger organisation is a nice change from working with smaller distributed teams but there are some down sides to it. Below are some thoughts and things to consider if you are thinking about going down the contractor route:

The monotony of the 9 to 5 - Since going self employed in 1999 I have been generally oblivious to the routine of; commute, work, commute. It's a bit of a shock to the system and personally I don't see the need for being in an office every day of the week when I do what I do. The last 3 projects I worked on prior to moving down to London were all delivered on time to budget and none of the team ever met in person, so although I can see the need to get together occasionally I don't think it's the most efficient way to work. I also have an issue with sitting someone down for 8 hours and expecting them to work efficiently - Where I currently work it's not quite like that, it's very relaxed, but the principle...

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contracting

Run windows or linux on your Mac for free*

18th September

UPDATE - I Hadn't realised that Microsoft had once again started to provide free downloads for all their browsers (they used to provide these a while back but stopped for some reason). The downloads are available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

A friend of mine recently tweeted that their license for Parallels had run out. When it comes to running other operating systems on your machine most people opt for either Parallels or VM Ware. This process is often known as Virtualization.

Virtualization is not emulation, it's an actual machine running within your machine so you can be sure that everything will work as it should.

What a lot of people don't know however is that Oracle offer a free product called Virtualbox, which will run on WIndows, Mac Os and Linux. All you need is either a CD or disk image to create the machine. Virtualbox also supports virtual disks which means that you don't have to pre-allocate a large chunk of your valuable disk to you...

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Virtualization
On the Tube home from Drupalcon

Drupalcon London 2011

8th September

I recently attended Drupalcon London. This was my third Drupalcon and as usual it went by in a flash. At the moment I'm working on contract in London with some other drupal developers who didn't attend so I wanted to point out why I think attending the conference is more than worth the minimal cost.

For me the biggest part of Druaplcon is meeting old and new friends, putting a face to that irc nick and having a chance to speak to other people in and outside the community... and beer. I always come away from the conference with a real vigour and energy to learn more and contribute more so for anyone who is thinking about dabbling in the community going to a con really kickstarts the process. The sessions are a bonus too and there were some great ones this year.

Jeff Noyes did a great presentation on design and the user experience - http://blip.tv/drupalcon/creating-and-measuring-the-user-experience-5493654

Larry Garfield's presentation on "code smells", was really well put together and informative - http://blip.tv/drupalcon/this-code-stinks-5491210

K...

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Drupalcon Drupal
Git

Git resources

23rd May

Following an impromptu git intro at Drupal 7 camp Leeds by mcjim, psynaptic and myself, I thought I should at least share some resources that I have come across during my time learning Git. In case you haven't heard of Git, it's a source code management tool. You can find out lots of information at the official site git-scm.com.

Useful links

Mastering Git basics - This is a great intro to understanding the fundamentals of git and really helped me to understand what was going on with branches, the stage and the index.

Git in action - I found this screencast really easy to follow and some nice tips specifically this command which gives you an awesome git log format. Just paste it into your shell. The code snippet originally came from here https://gist.github.com/515937.

git config --global alias.lg "log --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr %an)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative"

...

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Git
Drupal 7 camp leeds lanyard

Drupal 7 camp Leeds

22nd May

I had a great time at Drupal 7 camp Leeds. psynaptic and I did a presentation on the Render API in Drupal 7. I met some cool drupal people so a big thanks to all who attended and also a thank you to all the sponsors who made the event possible. Special thanks to Matt FIelding at panoetic for his help in putting the event together.

We also had a live Skype hook up with the King of Denmark himself Mr Morten DK, giving us a rundown on what to expect at Drupal design camp which I'll try to make if I can.

For me making new connections and sharing stories is what I enjoy most about these events and they always inspire me to get more involved in the Drupal community.

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Drupal