I was asked to blog about how life is going since I went Freelance at the beginning of April (2012, for legacy), so here goes. Life as a freelancer is just fucking awesome! I get to wake up when I want, work when I want and only accept the work that interests me. That’s the meat of this post to be honest, but I want to talk about a few things… Continue reading

Let’s jump right in. My friend and all round nice guy Stephen Fulljames decided to go, so we flew out together and were pretty much glued together for the couple days we were in Warsaw. We stayed in a nice hotel, which turned out to be where the speakers were staying, which I’ll come back to later. I’ve been to many conferences before, but this was my first international conference. I have many… Continue reading

This is more a rant than an informative piece. You have been warned. I read earlier that Opera are going to adopt the Webkit prefix to combat the potential monoculture created by Webkit not being shit and designers loving the direction it’s going in. This, as I’m sure you already know is absolutely fucking stupid. All this means is designers will use the -webkit- prefix even more as it’s now used in… Continue reading

As a new freelancer, there’s many things I’m embracing. There’s too many to list here, but one of those things is filtering who I work with. My ideal client would be somebody, or a company, that want my time, expertise and value my opinion. They care about the code I write, the designs I do and interactions I create. Do also don’t care that I charge what I do, which is… Continue reading

For a man in his position, being the figure head for the web, Jeffrey Zeldman‘s recent work on his own blog scares me a bit. This tweet is what worries me most: The beauty of big type on modern devices. One layout to rule them all.— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) April 20, 2012 What this says to me, is he’s skipping the whole point of responsive design, but simulating it’s effects for mobile… Continue reading

Recently, I’ve had the chance to talk with other speakers about what they find easy, hard and what they could offer to help me. The tips they’ve given me are just great! One of those tips was doing some sort of video blog. So, yesterday, I purchased a suction cup cradle thing for the car, in hops that I’ll do video blogs in there as I drive along (I drive… Continue reading

I’ll be honest. The reason I got into web development in the first place was not to make a difference or contribute to the web, but because it was something I could kind of do and it paid fairly well compared to other job options I had. I had grand ideas, but deep down I knew I was thinking bollocks and saw myself trapped in an agency for the rest… Continue reading

I spend a good portion of my time wondering what would happen if I did something, either in terms of work or personal things. I can anguish over a simple question for hours, days, weeks and even months. I know I’m not alone. I decided late last year I wanted to go freelance, just after my .net award actually. I knew I had to do the difficult thing and tell my… Continue reading

People like to talk about WordPress being bad, the wrong choice and it not being a CMS. I’m going to say, in defence,m that for me, it’s the right choice, every time, and why. This is obviously subjective, but it’s relative to me. So here goes. My career began because of Chris Coyier‘s early WordPress series of three videos. They helped me understand HTML, CSS, PHP and WordPress much more than… Continue reading

Today, I was doing some interesting z-index stuff for a new feature on the Devstars site. I had it working to spec, but I thought a nice touch would be bring the currently hovered item to the top of the thumbnail stack, with without breaking the above other elements which needed to be above it. See the gif for what I mean. Now, a quick caveat: This may not be the… Continue reading

Something I’ve said for a long time is; Life it what you make it. For me, that has never been truer than it is now. The last several months have been life changing for me. Specifics of what happened don’t matter, that’s not the point, but each and every one of these seemingly little events has shaped my life in profound ways. An example would be getting nominated for the .net… Continue reading

A reader emailed me asking about the ad network I have on this blog, how it works compared to ad-spot selling services and what the pay is like. It’s a good question and one I’m sure a few people might have, so I thought I’d bring my answer here. Before I go on, I should say, the reason I have ads on this blog is not to become a millionaire, but… Continue reading

For years, my long-term goal, was to work for myself, set my own deadlines, do more open source stuff, travel more, speak more, run workshops but most importantly, choose the work I do. Unfortunately, being 19 and having no client list when I first wanted this, meant it was just impossible. Two years later at 21, with much work done, names under my belt, experience gained and award won, it’s… Continue reading

It’s common practice these days to disable server-side errors on a production site, so much so that most major frameworks (Rails, CodeIgniter & more) all have switches for what is essentially live & dev. One of my major issues with Internet Explorer, is making a meal out of JavaScript errors. Even if something works properly, it’ll still throw in some errors. I would prefer to hide those on the production site,… Continue reading

All too often, a simple, mindless tweet makes me think a lot. For a long time, I’ve felt that the proverbial body of water between good and great design is increasing. If I had to be given a class, I would say I was a good designer, not a great one. Let me explain why. Good design is something that fulfils a purpose, it gets the job done. It can look pretty,… Continue reading