I have been involved with web development for around 10 years now. Sounds surprising but it’s true. My life/job has involved many things as well as pure web development. I have been involved with core business projects such as setting up a business, accounting and marketing as well as project and client management. When it comes to web development, my day to day activities include working with HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, Photoshop, WordPress, Magento, MySQL along with server setup and management. I call myself a php web developer because that is what I do most and what I love most; however I am really  a jack of all trades.

For most of the projects I have worked on I have been either the sole developer or the senior developer. Everything that I know about PHP has been self taught, everything has been trial and error. I did go to Teesside University and studied Information Technology which touched on some web development; however in my opinion the University need to seriously sort itself out when it comes to our industry, its shocking… but thats a blog/rant for another day.

Throughout my life as a developer, I been involved with many different sized project and when you don’t have another developer to bounce ideas off you learn quickly. It is also very easy for you to slip into bad habits. When you are planning a project you have to assume that your doing things the best way. You don’t want to show a ‘weakness’ and ask other developers if you are doing something the right way! After sometime, I realized I was reusing my own code over and over again in new projects. Therefore,  I started to comprise a folder of all the functions, classes, html templates and css that I would usually have to write from scratch for each project. At the time I did not realise this was known in the industry as a ‘framework’. By the time I came across frameworks such as Codeigniter, Zend and Kohana, I was too involved in my own framework. I had also made contact with other PHP developers online who were dead against using frameworks… ‘frameworks go against what PHP is’… ‘frameworks will slow down your system’… ‘frameworks contain loads of pointless code’… ‘frameworks will slow your development down’… the list goes on and on… so I got a bit stuck! I knew my own framework inside out, it was quick, it worked… why use anything else? PHP is all about using core PHP… thats what its all about… right?

One sunny day a guy called Alex Akass encouraged me to start to use an open source frmaework. I should mention that I have never met Alex in person; however we speak nearly every day on Skype. I may be a sole developer but I do have a solid development team made up of contacts I have met online and more recently at such events as PHPNE. Alex introduced me to Codeigniter and I started to use it for a live project. I work in an agency where project turnover is high. I don’t have the luxury of time to look at new technology and work on something inhouse to test it before working on a live client project. I trusted Alex and I dived in. Since that day my life has changed in so many ways. To list a few:

• More structured framework
• Input from years and years of other developers experience
• Access to functions and classes I would never have thought of
• Much more reliable and stable final projects
• Faster project development…. much faster!
• A shed load of online blog and video tutorials
• The feeling I am up-to-date
• etc…

I could go on and on… however there is one thing that is missing from the list above which has rocked my world. When I started to use Codeigniter I started to see that things were not so different to the structure I had put in place for my own framework. Things I had created functions for were included in Codeigniter. It was an amazing feeling. The years I have been working on my own learning from trial and error were not wasted. I did know what I was doing! I feel as if I owe this feeling of validation to Alex and the creators of Codeigniter. Since making the jump to Codeigniter,  every day I have had on development has been even more enjoyable than before. If there is anyone out there waiting to make the jump, stop waiting… jump! You are not alone.

Recently I have been attending PHPNE events in Newcastle. I spend an hour traveling there and back on the train so that I can join the others in the pub after the talk to network. Its been a real eye opener for me. I really enjoy meeting and talking to other developers. Today I am extremely excited because I have just put a blog post live on the PHPNE website announcing our October event… Phil Sturgeon will be giving an introduction on FuelPHP, a new ‘kick ass’ (the words he used when I was talking to him on Friday night at the #NENT event) framework he is part of.

Why am I so excited? Two reason. Firstly, Phil is a leading developer on Codeigniter. Codeigniter changed my life. Secondly I have recently been getting a lot of ear ache from Chris Scott telling me that I should take a look at Ruby on Rails, talking to me about things like migrations, ORM and HAML… Phil is also a leading developer on FuelPHP… and guess what… Fuel introduces things like ORM and migrations and has support for things like HAML…

If you are interested in attending the event you will need to be quick because spaces are limited. Head to the PHPNE website for more information and register on EventBrite asap.

A while ago I started to try a new mail client called Postbox. I have used Microsoft Outlook all my life but I was not happy with the way it grouped messages and since I am an iPhone user and really like the way that messages are grouped by subject, this has become a key thing to me. I also wanted to move away from Microsoft. Postbox have been releasing updates quite often since I started using it and the most recent update make the hole thing look and work amazingly so I am more than happy and would recommend it to anyone.

One thing that has been a little problem is the way it manages contacts. I did have a very robust way of backing up and syncing my contacts between all my devises. I have an iPhone, iPad, Laptop, work desktop and home desktop.

I now focus my sync around Google contacts. If you keep all your contacts in Google you can then link your iPhone/iPad to live sync. You can then link Soocial and Google Contacts to keep a backup. You can then pop along to http://www.postbox-inc.com/extensions and download Zindus which will sync the ‘Personal Address Book’ in Postbox to Google Contacts.

Great setup, no need to do anything.

Hope this help someone in the same situation.

I had an absolutely amazing time in New York for my 30th birthday.

Had am awesome brunch. Walked round Central Park to take some pics with my new SLR Fiona got me. Went up Empire State building. Had many beers with Simon whilst girls went shopping. Went to Toys r us in Times Square. Now getting ready for a nice birthday tea. All whilst visiting New York in the middle of a snow storm! 30th Birthday… DONE!

We were due to fly back from Malta on Sunday 16^th May at around 11pm. However, due to what the media are now saying was a non-existent ash cloud, the flight was cancelled.

We were lucky that the hotel we were staying in was very helpful and set us up with three more rooms for the night. After some good use of the hotel internet cafe we had managed to rebook our flights but this time for Luton rather than Leeds Bradford. We arranged to keep our current hire cars for another day and booked hire cars for the UK for the journey from Luton to Leeds.

We took the hire cars to Luqa airports in Malta, got a flight from Malta to Luton, took a bus to pick up our UK hire cars, drove from Luton to Leeds (my parents house), picked up my car and Molly, drove from Leeds to Marske to drop Fiona’s parents off then back home in Thornaby.

Although we have been hit by the ‘ash chaos’ we had a very successful trip. Fiona is part Maltese from her Dads side of the family. When thinking about our wedding we both agreed we did not really want a wedding in the UK. Malta seemed a great option. We both set about Googleing to find some information and ended up contacting the same person without either of us knowing. We viewed four potential venues and have already settled on the venue. We viewed a number of churches and we just have to finalise which one we like out of the final two.

To follow our wedding story check out www.jimandfi.co.uk where a few select pics of our pre-wedding trip will be uploaded soon.

…the time is coming when our army of third-party developers can unleash their Tesco Grocery API powered applications on the world.

One of these developers is James Mills, an IT programmer who came along to our Tesco TJAM day back in August last year.

James has developed a Facebook application called ‘My Shopping Assistant’ which allows Facebook users to shop groceries with us.

Click here to read the full blog post

This is really exciting because it comes only a few days after Nick showed his support for the My Shopping Assistant facebook app by becoming a fan of the facebook app.

Things are really starting to get moving now with My Shopping Assistant. The facebook app, although it does not do much at the moment, is getting used quite frequently and is attracting quite a bit of interest.

Another app which we are working on is the Joggler app which Sam Whisker is helping develope. This is really exciting and we hope to have a version released very soon.

Further reading:

• My Shopping Assistant home page
• My Shopping assistant blog (work in progress)
• My Shopping Assistant Facebook app
• Video of My Shopping Assistant Joggler app in development

The Joggler is a classic example of what Nick Lansley refers to as a fourth device it is designed to sit in the kitchen or in a communal place within the home. It allows easy access to an always on always connected device. O2 have tried their best to market it around their calendar service and push it as a devise that will keep the family organised allowing the entire family to know what each other is doing etc. The problem with this is that most people will already be using a calendar service which they are happy with and have fitted their life around how that works and nobody is going to switch to a service which is clunky and not as streamlined. The interface of the o2 calendar on the devise is good and easy to view but lets be honest, I am more than happy with Google Calendar and its going to take a lot and I mean a lot to move me away. I can sync my Google Calendar with Outlook on my laptop, Outlook on my desktop at home, Outlook on my desktop at work using Google Calendar Sync and I can use Goolge Sync and my iPhone Microsoft Exchange settings to sync my calendar with my mobile. Its easy and it works without me having to do anything. Fiona can even add things to my calendar without me knowing and I get alerts and I can see what I am doing on any devise I want.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found out that o2 will be releasing an update this week which will add an appstore of some sorts to the Joggler devise and…. they will be adding a Google Calendar app to the appstore!!!

This is great news… one because it means they are not going to force people to use their own calendar service and secondly because they are opening up the devise to developers to developer apps just like Apple have done with the iPhone.

OK so I knew that this was in the pipe line because I have been working with Sam Whisker for a while now to release an app for the Joggler for My Shopping Assistant. My Shopping Assistant is a set of applications which work on different devises (only a couple at the moment) which allow you to add, update and delete things from your Tesco.com basket. Some of you will already know I have been working with the Tesco.com API for a while now since my trip to London to the T-Jam event. I have written my own API which sits in-between the Tesco API and my own applications so that I can ‘add value’ to what they already offer. I will keep my main idea under wraps for now… you will hear more about it when we get the basics finished.

At the moment there is a beta facebook app out which you can access and test right now on facebook -  My Shopping Assistant facebook application. Although there are many features still to add you can do the basics of search for products and adding them to your Tesco.com basket! All from within facebook! Awesome right!

So the great news is that the Joggler will be getting an update this week and although you may not have heard much about it online (their online marketing and buzz for this has been poor) this is going to start something great and really kick start the Joggler as a devise.

Keep your eye out for the My Shopping Assistant Joggler app in the appstore really soon!

I really don’t want to, it’s not that I think I have anything interesting to say or that I think people will be interested in what I have to say… It’s more that I really want a blog!

I am not great with the English language when it comes to writing… My grammer is poor and my spelling is poor, probably a few reasons why it’s taken me years to try and kick start a blog. I have so many things I want to say about what I do for a living and also so much I would love to share about technology I love and play around with… I struggle to put my thoughts and findings into words.

If the past is anything to go by then I will probably not post for another couple of months now and when I do post it will be about how I have not posted for a while and how I really want to blog blarr blarr blarr!

Let’s see what happens!

Two things to note. Firstly I am now engaged. Secondly I am writing this post in bed on my iPhone using the wordpress app. Awesome!

I will try to find the time to redesign the blog to fit in with the rest of the ‘jgm’ look and feel and I am going to try and blog more about things I am doing and what I find interesting.

I am working on a sites called My Shopping Assistant and I am going to try work some late nights to get that finished by the end of Feb. I will blog about that more closer to the time.

I have also just got a Joggler which is awesome. I think I will do a post on that soon…

Hope everyone is well. I am looking for some freelance work at the moment so stay in contact and let me know if you have any leads.