Friday, March 20, 2009

Time for a change

Well, I am now in the closing hours of my last day of work at my current job. It's been a challenging role and I have learnt a huge amount about the finance industry.

Looking forward to the future fills me with a huge amount of excitement mixed with a little bit of nervousness. It's not every day you give up a well paying job, pack up your life and move country. I have no doubt that the next year will be full of challenges, but I am really looking forward to it all. I can't wait to build my business into New Zealands best shopping comparison site.

But first, before anything else, I think it's time for a holiday!

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Monday, March 16, 2009

Be careful where you get your information

The internet is rife with misinformation.

As a developer you tend to depend heavily on searching for examples of how to solve a particular problem such as code snippets, and patterns and practices. There is very little ground breaking work and it is almost certain that someone has been there, done that, and blogged the solution to your problem already.

Problems arise when you choose the wrong source to trust. For example, today I was trying to figure out how to get ASP.NET not to render a name attribute for the form element as we are starting to target XHTML 1.1 compliance for BeforeYouBuy. A quick google came up with this.

Certainly the answer that is proposed is "a solution", but it's certainly not "the solution". A slight modification to my search turned up this how to on the msdn site.

It's really down to knowing where to look.

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

BeforeYouBuy is online!

After a long time and a huge amount of hard work BeforeYouBuy is finally live! I'm very proud of what we've achieved and excited about what the future holds.

We've got an almost endless list of enhancements and improvements already, but the site is pretty usable and functional already.

It's been a great journey, learned a lot of new tricks, tackled a fair bit of new technology and hit more than our fair share of challenges. Now that we're finally online expect to see a few more posts. We're always interested in any feedback you might have too!

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