A little update

Well, hey there! It's been a while, hasn't it? I can only apologise. My nose has been to the grind since moving to London. Although that makes it sound like it's been all go here that's not quite the whole picture.

Despite moving over 100 miles away, I'm still working for the same company in Poole. It's amazing that's even possible. If I were to think 10 years ago I would be able to develop a massive website with a group of others in a completely different part of the country, I would have said... well, I would have probably said something about Pokemon. I would have been 12, after all.

It does help that the focus of the company has changed somewhat. It's less a web development agency (but I still do maintain a few sites we've got ongoing) and now more of a SaaS company. I'm 90% working on a product called Cinolla. It's an activity centre booking system. Okay, not mass appeal there, but there's certainly the need for a shake-up in that area.

Now I look at it from a distance, I realise it does a whole lot of stuff for what sounds like a rather niche product. It's got an email system in there courtesy of MailChimp, you can take payments from inside the app with SagePay, a self-contained membership section to allow customer entry to members only areas at the centre and it almost has a customer-facing front end so individual customers can make booking straight from an already existing website. That's not even mentioning all the other boring numbers stuff. It's jam packed.

And the great thing about SaaS (and perhaps the way we're going about it) is that if there's someone who needs X in their new system, we can build X to be available for everyone. Take the membership section I've built for example. What could be seen as quite niche for one company has been made to work for all.

There's something for everyone, but it's by no means done. So that means it's heads down into web dev in general.

But I'm keen to dip my toes in things outside just PHP and JS. Trying out some new things like Sass to neaten up the CSS for my personal site redesign at the minute. But I also want to get my hands on a next-gen Kinect and get on with making Moto what it should have been had time and technology not been limited.

But yes. Much to do. This gets said so much these days, but I hope to keep this blog a bit more lively when I get the time to do things other than the daily grind that I can make some noise about. Hopefully when I finally decide on a design a like for the personal site, I can copy it over to the blog side and might inspire a few blog posts along the way!