At the start of last week (1st April 2014 to be precise), I made the leap across the border from Telford & Wrekin Council over to Shropshire to become Project WIP's joint newest member, alongside Dan Franey. I've spent the last eight years with Telford and when you spend that length of time in any one place it's inevitably a bit of a wrench to move elsewhere. You don't always realise how deeply embedded into the culture of an organisation you've become until all the friends, colleagues and contacts you build up over the years that allow you to get stuff done (and talk about football with!) are no longer there to help, and you're the new kid in school again.
So who am I, and what am I here for? I began writing web applications around ten years ago in the days of Classic ASP, and as the technology has moved on I've made the shift into .NET and object oriented programming as a natural progression. My work at Telford mainly revolved around writing .NET applications for internal teams, which is more interesting than it possibly sounds as it gave me a good grounding in problem solving in .NET, and the chance to work with some really talented technical developers.
I first came across the Digital Services team here as a developer with Telford. Back then, we were looking at CMS solutions to replace our SharePoint / WordPress based operations and we'd heard a bit about the Umbraco solution which the "guys up the A5" were raving about, and had been impressed with their results. The bonus was the fact that it would work well with Telfords native (Windows based) hosting environments, for which WordPress was a bit of a poor fit.
After attending the Umbraco LocalGov event hosted here in Shirehall I came away pretty impressed with the level of innovation in evidence at Shropshire Council. Refreshingly, the web team seemed to be thinking their way around the problems from the ground up in a genuinely innovative fashion, so when they advertised for a developer back in February I was happy to throw my hat in the ring, and even more happy when I was appointed to the role as it was something I could definitely see myself being part of.
I'm a web designer first and foremost, and have been building websites in various forms for around ten years. I like simple, semantic web design. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (as this guy once said) and it's the hardest thing to get right, but also yields the best results when done properly. That's probably one for another blog post though...
"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law." - Louis Sullivan
It's been a bit of an afterthought in places I've worked before, but the team here work extensively with semantics and web accessibility as part of their core design process, so I'm hoping to learn lots of new stuff to build on what I know. Actually, the learning curve looks more like a cliff face from my position at the bottom. It's a very different emphasis here, much less quantity and much more quality, which I really like.
So that's me in a nutshell. I dare say you'll be hearing more from me in the future once I've found my feet and got my teeth into some proper projects. And yes, that's a Steven Seagal quote at the top of my first blog. Happy with that. See you on the other side!
Mike.