SurfiOnline

When you stop writing for months, and your general participation on the Internet drops, there’s always those few who are pondering what happened, where you’ve been and what you’re up to. It was last October that I’d actually written - and dare I say it, last January that I’d actually visited this place. In an attempt to start writing some more, I’m back.

The last 6 months have been nothing but a whirlwind of crazy insane for me.

• In October 2007, I took up a job as developer at a Sydney based web application company called Interspire. I’m working on what is the ultimate e-commerce and shopping cart software, Interspire Shopping Cart. I briefly touched on this in a previous post that I’ll be rewriting again shortly.

  I’m working with a great bunch of people - everyone knows their stuff and I’ve learnt a lot as well since starting. There’s a lot of great things that’ll be coming out of Interspire over the next 12 months and I’m especially excited with what we’ve got in store for Interspire Shopping Cart. We’ve got new people starting left, right and centre who we’re training up as quick as possible.

  Speaking of Shopping Cart, the release has been exceptional - we’ve seen lots of feedback, we’re loving what people are getting up to with the product and the stores they’re creating. A lot of the feedback focuses on the usability and ease of use of our Interspire Shopping Cart compared to our competitors. This is something we aim for at Interspire and can do very well - developing very easy to use but powerful web applications.

• Having purchased a Macbook Pro in December, I’ve slowly been transitioning to using Mac OS X full time (compared to a split share between my desktop and my Mac Mini). I’ve now essentially made the full time switch to Mac OS X, even using it for full time development at work - it’s amazing how much more productive you feel when you make the move.
• That being said, I’ve also been investing a fair amount of resources in to Microsoft Windows Home Server. It’s made managing the network at home, ridiculously easy without having to worry about backups, remote access and file sharing. The expanding file system by simply plugging in another hard drive make it ridiculously to expand. I’ve now racked up nearly 2.5 TB of storage in my home server and it’s all exclusively managed by the server itself - I don’t need to worry about shuffling anything around or if I’m going to run out of space on one volume/disk.
• In January 2008, we headed down to to Lake Conjola, as we do every year. This year was no exception to the norm with over 2,000 photos being taken - most of which I am still yet to finish post-processing before uploading them to flickr. By the way, am I the only one who hates the fact that they support video now?
• When Apple announced the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK, I decided it would be an excellent time to continue learning Objective C so that once the iPhone launches in Australia (which will hopefully be this July and include 3G as rumored), I can take advantage of the powerful platform it provides. I’m still reading and learning so there isn’t much to show for it at the moment.
• 6 months ago, if you’d told me to “go and read a book”, I’d have told you that I’d rather do other things to waste my times. Not only did I think books were a waste of time for myself I couldn’t understand how some people could just sit and read. These days it’s different. I read a lot of the time either on the train to work or on the way home during the week and sometimes at night when I’m not up to something else. I’ve been buying up from Amazon with still more books waiting to be delivered.
• Marketing is something I never thought I’d be interested in. Recently though, and since starting at Interspire, I’ve taken a bit of a liking to marketing and am eagerly learning as much as I can - especially about how you push a product in to an already very competitive market (e-commerce applications), and push your company as a global brand. I’ve learnt a lot regarding Search Engine Optimisation too. Previously I already knew a lot but now I’m learning all of the untold tips and tricks the most successful companies use to earn higher rankings.
• I’m reducing my participation with the MyBB Group. We’re doing some amazing things, but sadly I don’t have the time to develop the product like I used to. I’m now moving in to a more administrative role overseeing the product - the product development manager whilst our excellent development team continue to put together what is already the web’s most powerful free forum application. As difficult as this for me to do, it’s in the best interests of the project.
• Photography is something I’ve always been interested in but never really had the time to take it up properly as a hobby. Sadly, that hasn’t changed because I still don’t have the time. I’ve been reading up a bit recently about lightbox photography - white boxes you put objects in to take photos of and I’ve just ordered my own. It’ll be interesting when it arrives as to see what I can accomplish with it. I’m also wanting to get in to professional/model photography but not too sure where to start with that one.

That’s about all I’ve got in the tank for now. I’m really enjoying what I’m up to these days but don’t nearly have the amount of free time that I once did - the trade off though is that I’m (especially at work) working on a lot of exciting and new things. I’ll be back again shortly with some more adventures.