New year, new work/fun ...

It's been a pretty good start to 2010 for me. At the day job there was a major update that one of our data suppliers was doing between 31/12/2009 and 1/1/2010. When I say major, I mean a complete change required to every system that touches that data. Several teams had been spending the better part of 6 months preparing. Having only recently joined I wasn't deeply involved, I just helped prep and perform testing, but I was still very glad when everything went as planned.

As for my other main project things have been progressing well. I've implemented over half of the new design and had a wonderful few weeks discovering that JQuery really is one of the most wonderful things ever. Making the use of Javascript in browsers "just work" has made my life much easier and enabled me to implement far more interactive components than I had planned. I tip my hat to them.

Even though things have been going well I'm still a little bit behind schedule on the project, so lots of effort over the next few weeks to catch up. But, as I described in my last post ("In the zone ...") it is much more joyous for me this time around. This is also because I have made it much easier on myself. I spent a little bit of cash to pick up a second monitor (an Apple Cinema Display 23" second hand) and a new office chair/foot rest. The combination of these things makes working at home a lot easier than it used to.

Hopefully this will all have been a good investment and I can finish the new design so the rest of the team can relaunch the site and I can spend a little time on some new personal projects. I hope you are looking forward to the rest of 2010 as much as I am.