Twenty years of web design

I do not usually talk about my work but as the 6th of November 2015 marks my 20th anniversary of entering the world of work i shall make an exception and maybe drone on with a few war stories.

Having graduated in the Summer of 1995 with a degree in Software Engineering i naturally was aiming for a career in computing though i had little idea doing what. I was successful in my second interview after graduation and started work at a company called Third Wave. My new boss had recently been to the US and seen the demos of Netscape 2.0 which, it was hoped, would bring the new (and hardly used compared to today) world wide web to the masses. He also heard about the promising new technologies like SSH which would enable secure commerce over the internet, e-commerce in other words. I was hired to produce websites for a new off-shoot company called Tw2, specifically websites that could sell stuff...

Now this was all new to me to be honest, i hadn't even seen a graphic web page at that point. I had been using the internet since 1991 at uni but this was with telnet, ftp and the likes. I had "surfed" in text-mode using lynx and had done some basic html but not actually seen a proper webpage. Still that didn't matter i've never been one to worry about that kind of thing! On my first day in my new job i went online (dial-up natch) and had a look around. These were the early days of the web still, especially in terms of e-commerce. Amazon's website had only started up a few months before. An internet search (what search engine i used i cannot remember, this was years before Google) indicated that i needed to do some CGI programming and Perl. I hadn't heard of either before.

I also needed a web server, though we did not have any web space at the time. I ran OS/2 Warp on my PC at home and knew that could run a web server so i installed OS/2 on my work PC, downloaded a Perl implementation and started work. I was to create an e-commerce website for a large retailer called Software Warehouse. We were aiming to go live in early 1996 but first of all we had to prove the concept to the heads of the major software houses and suppliers at a presentation in a London hotel in December. Yes next month!

I was given a data dump of the stock database, a huge mass of text (text dump from SQL Server i believe) and my first job was to develop a CGI search for that data. This was not a simple process especially as i was having to learn Perl at the same time though luckily as i found out Perl is excellent for handling text files. With few resources online (and limited dial-up access anyway - i had to dual boot the PC into Windows to go online to look for stuff then reboot into OS/2 to implement what i had found!) i once had to resort to going to Waterstones one lunchtime and looking up how to do something in a book on Perl!

However progress was steady and as December approached the website was taking shape (albeit all running on my PC). My boss Ross was a great designer, and a rabid Steve Jobs and Apple fan (the man had a working Lisa in my office - i'm sure my later conversion to Mac-dom is largely thanks to him). His design for the Software Warehouse website was based on NeXT's site though went further. Our site was not just a digital brochure, visitors could search a database, could add things to a basket and then go and purchase them. This seems so common place now but in late 1995 it was genuinely cutting edge.

It was now time for the demonstration, where Ross would demonstrate my website (running on my PC still) to some of the heads of the British computing industry (heads of Adobe UK, Corel et cetera). I was there just in case anything went wrong... but no it all went smoothly and everyone seemed suitably impressed (or at least not too appalled). Now all that was left to do was actually implement the site on a proper server, installing the horror that was Netscape Commerce Server to handle the secure connections, and building a back-end for order management. But that was for 1996. This blog post is about my first few months at work as a web developer.

These days i am an e-learning developer, creating online courses for a distance learning college. I haven't really touched e-commerce (apart from as a user) since my Tw2 days (which lasted until the company went bust in 2001) but that's fine. I was there at the start, the Software Warehouse e-commerce site was one of the first in the UK, and i'm proud to have had to build everything from scratch. But life moves on and the stuff i do these days, especially involving responsive design for mobile learning, makes me proud too.

A farewell to Worcester

I've been taking a lot of photographs in Worcester this year as thats where i have been working! However on Friday that will end, i will bid farewell to Worcester after 6 months and will instead be working in Solihull. I am sad to go in many ways, the people i work with are great and Worcester itself is wonderful though its a long way to go every day and there are other issues (which its best not to go into!)

But anyway its been great Worcester, and i'll be back to visit for sure. How about a photo of some lovely wild flowers taken near the river?

20 years of web

Unfortunately the exact date is now lost, never mind any physical or virtual remains, but I started writing my first web page in early 1994. I can't remember much about my first involvement with HTML except that it was purely text based. My computer at the time was a 386sx-33 powered PC and I connected to the internet via dial up at a roasting 2400 baud. I used Lynx to look at my first web pages and hence my first home page.

Little did I know at the time that HTML and the web would be my career and shape my life in such a fundamental way over the next couple of decades.

The first graphical web pages I looked at where probably in OS/2's web browser (my parents bought me a RAM upgrade for my PC and OS/2 Warp as a graduation present - a RAM upgrade up to 8MB that is, but it was fine!) My first job in November 1995 was as a web developer, I got this job with the brief to built web sites that could sell stuff despite the fact I had not seen an actual web page on the web, apart from text based pages in Lynx and the odd locally hosted experiment, before. However by late December I had built the prototype of what would become of the UK's first ecommerce websites and it was demonstrated to an assembled audience of UK computer industry chiefs in a swanky London hotel. Not bad going considering I hasn't even heard of Perl and CGI programming before I got the job. I had to learn while building the site of course, budgets were tight and the development (and indeed the simulation) ran on a web server running on my work PC (OS/2 again, natch). I even had to go into Waterstones one lunch time to look up how to do something in Perl as online resources were pretty basic back then.

Crazy days, everything was so new and I had to make most stuff up as I went along. I've never been a good programmer but I am good at solving problems. Nowadays I am an e-Learning developer (new job, only my third though) and it's all Flash based but we'll be soon switching to a new system which is HTML5 based and the circle keeps on turning...

The end of a chapter

I thought this year would be fairly uneventful, plough on at work as usual and get most of my dissertation out of the way before the deadline next January but life is seldom totally predictable. On Thursday i left my employer of 12 years and now will be (for the next few months at least) a full time student!

It was sad to leave my colleagues (who gave me a lovely send-off) and the university (where i also studied for 5 years) but life goes on. Now i can concentrate on my studies for a while but also take stock and decide where i want to go next in life. For 18 years i have worked in web development, maybe its time for a change, or work for myself. Lets have a good think anyway.

The art of post-it art

This week i got an album by Tender Forever, and pretty good it is too. One thing i noted immediately though (apart from the fact the CD seems to want to kill my Macbook's drive) is that the title of the album on the cover had been done using post-it notes.

And very cute too... the post-it notes of course. This reminded me of a similar thing i did at work a number of years ago. Every year each office competes with their Christmas decoration display, usually though in our office we takes ages to do anything because we are a) so busy to bother with such trivialities b) can't be arsed.

However a couple of years ago i decided to put up a decoration but do something very different as befitting someone in Creative Services. I created a Christmas tree out of post-it notes.

Did it create a stir? Well it certainly generated some comments. We did not win the competition though as apparently its better going to Poundland and turning your office into a tack-fest, not that i am bitter of course.

Last year i also went all creative with post-it notes though this time i decided to take it to the next dimension... i went 3-D. I created candles and a nativity scene out of various pieces of cardboard and decorated these items with post-it notes and pieces of felt. You see the humble post-it note is the most important invention in human civilisation since the invention of fire. They are just so useful, i do all my financial modelling using them for example. Sometimes you can even use them to leave yourself a note too.

A matter of reading the label

I use goat milk not cow milk, and i am unique in that at work (i like to be special). Therefore i buy my own milk instead of using the department provided cow juice which is fine... until people start using my milk depriving me. I've tried putting labels on the carton (as obviously the supermarket's own "Goat Milk" label isn't sufficient) and i've even sent out an e-mail to the department asking people to not use my milk.

But yesterday my new bottle was still half-empty by the early afternoon, and that wasn't because of me! This upset me a lot but also shows how people don't read the label(s). I've actually seen people in the past take my bottle of the fridge and use it without a glance, its a good job it is actually milk in there and not urine isn't it?

My new idea is to go three dimensional and add a tag to the handle, maybe people will notice then but i'm not holding my breath.

Meeting request

There is no more terrifying event in the universe than a meeting request arriving in your work e-mail box. Receiving such a request is guaranteed to bring on a wave of despair and sorrow.

As you may have gathered therefore I am not a fan of meetings and try to avoid them. I am an engineer (well software anyway) and prefer to do stuff rather than talk about it. I also prefer to be told what to do rather than talk about it. So maybe i am a submissive engineer. Or at least one with Asbergers.

Thats not to say that i think meetings have no value, without meetings how would any organisation ever operate. What would all those managers do without meetings to attend? Notepad sales would also plummet. Meetings just arn't for me. My mind wanders after about 15 minutes and i start thinking about Star Trek and then get rudely awaken from my daydream about being Captain Sisko by someone asking me something web related. "Erm... raise shields?"

Maybe i am just going about these things the wrong way and i should embrace the meeting culture instead of trying to shun it. I should relish "touching base" (actually i do but thats not a subject for this kind of blog) and formulating "action points" and facilitating  a "raft of measures" during a "thought shower"?

This would involve far too much normal behaviour and meeting human beings for me though alas.