It may have been a short and bumpy ride but, equally, it’s been educational and emotional. Last Summer, I started working at Yahoo! Europe in the heart of London’s West End. After nearly a year, it saddens me to say it is time to turn the page and move on to the next exhilirating chapter that is my career. As of 5pm this evening, I shall no longer be a Yahoo.

When I took the plunge last June and handed in my notice at West Midlands Fire Service, I knew I was signing up for quite a large challenge, mentally and physically. Yahoo! hired only the finest web developers in the industry so expectations were high. Personally, I had long admired the work of many Yahoo’s such as Christian Heilmann, Tom Coates and Drew Mclellan so it was a great honour to join the team too.

On joining the company, I was thrown in the deep end on a new community-driven website (that I’m still under an NDA on so can’t really elaborate). I was glad to see Yahoo! was mainly a PHP house so I felt comfortable getting my hands dirty on the code, as well as conversing with colleagues over Best Practises for certain aspects of the development process. It was a refreshing change to see active discussions in the team and department as a whole - it all felt right. Christian pushed the idea of Lightning Talks, giving members of the team a five minute outlet opportunity to showcase their recent studies, Norm was busy compiling “Norm’s Laws” (better described as Best Practises in the coding world) while everyone enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of working in (arguably) the coolest company in the World. From a professional point of view, I was in heaven!

So what changed? Commuting to and from London daily was never going to be easy. Everyone said that. But, in all honesty, it didn’t bother me. Apart from the ridiculous maintenance works on the East Coast Mainline, it only took an hour and half from door to door and with 50 minutes or so on the train to relax or work. The biggest problem was the cost. With the hike in prices at the start of 2008, my monthly travel cost was in excess of £600 which simply exceeded my budget for travel. Among other reasons, I decided it was time to move on and find something local to home.

On browsing the Reed recruitment website, I found a few positions that interested me so sent off the recently refreshed resumé and got a fairly fast response from one company. The interview was pretty prompt and, within the day, they were offering me a package I couldn’t turn down. So, as of Tuesday 27th May, I shall be responsible for the migration and redevelopment of the online presence for high-end vehicle insurance company Premium Choice, a branch of KGM. The company are based in the recently refurbished Fort Dunlop building near the M6 of Birmingham so travelling will be cheaper and quicker and it also allows me to spend more time with the family (flexi time is certainly a benefit worth seeking too ).

While it is a shame to be leaving Yahoo! at such an interesting time (the products that are lined up for the next year or two look really exciting), as well as leaving behind a lot of great friends, I am really looking forward to starting the new job. There will be a lot more responsibility involved that shall cover a lot broader range of skills than was required at Yahoo! or WMFS but that hasn’t disheartened me. I am determined to deliver some high-end products to match the high-end market Premium Choices target and I already have some interesting ideas to develop with the company that have never really penetrated the insurance market up to now. Let’s just say “watch this space”…

For some of us, the idea of sitting in a park all day, drinking, eating, playing games and having an all-round laugh sits up there in our top five things to do in the Summer. For some of us, we need to get out in the open air as our jobs restrict us to the confounds of our computer, beavering away to create the next masterpiece website that our client is hovering over our back for.

If this sounds oh-so-familiar to you, the answer is in Warwickshire this Summer in the return of Geek In The Park.

Back in 2006, the Multipack hosted the first ever Geek In The Park which was a huge success. People travelled from all over the UK with their families for a day of sun, food and games in the beautiful surroundings of Jephson Gardens. In the evening, everyone contravened to The Jug and Jester, the local watering hole, for an open discussion with industry leaders Patrick Lauke and Bruce Lawson about accessibility on the Internet. Everyone enjoyed the day and were really looking forward to the next Geek In The Park.

After a year’s break, Geek In The Park 2008 returns to Leamington Spa on Saturday 9th August, this time promising to be just as enjoyable as last time, if not moreso.

Trevor Morris has managed to organise some fantastic speakers who will be announced very soon, as well as pulling out all the stops on a gorgeous website co-designed with Paul Lloyd. I suggest you sign up to the email announcements to be informed of future developments and announcements while you’re over there too.

The Multipack will also be going on a reccy to Leamington Spa on Saturday 14th June to find some suitable bars for the evening session of Geek In The Park, so if you fancy joining us, get to know some faces before August and generally have a good laugh, tag along! The finer details are all on Upcoming and it would be great if you added your name to the attendance list so we know who to expect on the day before moving on. We shall also be updating Twitter with our current location so be sure to follow us if you plan on joining in a bit later.

So put the date in your diary and be sure to get your train tickets to Leamington very soon. It should be a great day!

After what seems like an age, I can finally announce one of the projects I have been pouring my time in to over the last few months. Not only was I content with working full-time at Yahoo! as well as running a fortnightly podcast, after the success of World Cup KickOff, it seemed only natural to follow this up with its European counterpart - Euro KickOff.

Next month, from 7-29th June, Euro 2008 will be kicking off in host countries Austria and Switzerland - a tournament of sixteen countries competing for the crown of Champions of Europe. While none of the “home countries” have actually qualified this time round (which I’m sure most England fans are still blaming Mr Mclaren for), I couldn’t let that dampen my intentions of delivering what seemed to be quite a popular service among football fans around the World last time round. There are still 16 countries from around Europe who will be following their teams religiously next month and would love to have a one-stop reference (and download) of the all important kick-off times.

The Team

Rather than go it alone on this project, I had a great team to work with to make sure we delivered a top quality service. Thankfully, from the success of World Cup KickOff, I had established a great friendship with Brian Suda so he was really keen to get involved and lend his hand on the technical background of the project.

I also realised it would make sense to bring in another developer on the project to spread the workload so I roped in Klaus Komenda from Yahoo! (who is also from Austria so also had knowledge of one host country too). I have worked with Klaus on multiple projects at Yahoo! and I was certain he had the ability to deliver a high-end product with super efficient code.

On the design side of the website, I asked fellow Multipacker Gareth Brown from One Black Bear to go wild and create an impressive and memorable design the users were sure to remember. I think you can agree the design is absolutely superb, bringing together the nature of the website as well as harnessing the locality of the event this time round.

The Website

So now it’s all designed, developed and out there in the open, what does Euro KickOff actually do? Well, it simply allows you to download all the kick off times of Euro 2008 in to your calendar, whether you use Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird or your mobile device.

The fixtures are accessible in the generic ICS calendar file format so should work in most calendar applications. If your software is capable of subscribing to remote calendars, you can always subscribe to the Euro 2008 fixtures so they are automatically updated with final scores as well.

But rather than stop there, we’ve made it so the user can choose which fixtures they want to follow. Rather than just make you download all the fixtures, you can customize the fixtures by a chosen team or group, the later stages, venue or date. That way you only get the matches that matter to you.

Future Plans

We still have a few plans for Euro KickOff which will be released in the next few weeks.

We are currently working on a Developer API to access the fixture times of Euro 2008, allowing other people to build their own applications.

We are also hoping to release the website in other languages later this week (it seems quite cheeky to build a service in a language that none of the attending countries speak natively).

We are also in talks with quite a significant figure in the industry who want to collaborate on the project. More on that soon.

Spread The Word

So now it’s built, what now? Well, it just needs to be used.

I know many readers of this blog are from the UK so probably don’t have a massive interest in Euro 2008 this year. But think about this - won’t it be a lot more fun to support a team you’re not emotionally attached to and see how far they will go? Why not have a bit of a sweep stake with your friends or at work, pick a team from the pot for a quid and the winner at the end wins all the donations? You could use Euro KickOff to track your team to make sure you know when they are playing and have a bit of fun in the process.

You could also arrange when to meet with friends for a bit a social event around certain games such as your team’s fixtures, opening ceremony or big final. By having all the dates and times in one place, it will be a lot easier to arrange your visit to the pub, party or even flights to Austria or Switzerland. Any excuse for a few drinks…

 

Euro KickOff has been a really cool project to work on and I’m really proud of the finished product. The entire team have excelled themselves and I’m sure they all are very proud to see their efforts all come together. Fingers crossed for an exciting tournament now…

Some of you might be interested to hear that Yahoo! are looking for some new Web Developers.

Ideally, they’re looking for juniors so they can adapt to the company methods a bit easier but that’s not essential. As long as the candidate is passionate about Web Standards and can demonstrate their ability with some examples, that should be enough to land an interview.

For anyone who is interested or might know of someone who is, you can download the job description here.

From a personal point of view, this is a great opportunity. Yahoo! is a great company to work for (regardless of all the negative press lately) who are keen advocates of the Web Standards movement and adopting modern methods and technologies such as OpenID and the Semantic Web. As far as your personal development is concerned, there is a huge team of amazingly talented “Webdevs” for you to mix with while picking their brains and training packages (internally and externally) are fantastic too.

Give me a shout if you want in, sending me a CV with some example URLs.

I’ll also be at the next Multipack meeting on Saturday 12th April 2008 if you want to ask me any questions directly.

Yahoo! Junior Web Developer - Job Description

As the world’s number one Internet brand Yahoo! delivers news, entertainment, information and fun to over a half billion people every day. Our European web development team, based in London, is seeking standards-savvy front-end developers to work on Europe’s busiest sites.

You should be able to provide examples of your work showing use of progressive enhancement techniques (e.g. unobtrusive scripting), and clear separation of structure, presentation and behaviour layers.

Required Skills

• Hand-coded (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Solid knowledge of standards-based, accessible, cross-browser web development
• PHP programming skills
• User-level experience with BSD/Linux
• Experience using version control systems such as CVS & Subversion

Desirable Skills

• Client- and server�side performance optimisation techniques
• Search engine optimisation
• Experience in developing web applications with rich client interfaces using AJAX, drag and drop, and other DOM Scripting techniques.
• Experience with JavaScript libraries, especially the YUI
• Experience of Web Services (eg REST, SOAP, XML-RPC)
• Knowledge of web site internationalisation issues and experience developing web sites in multiple languages particularly in Europe.
• Use of the following technologies: XML/XSLT, Perl, Microformats, JSON, Flash/Flex
• Experience developing functionality/applications by assembling existing code modules

Responsibilities

You will work closely with Information Architects, Visual Designers, User Researchers, Software Engineers, and Product Managers to ensure that our web based products in Europe provide the best possible experience for our users.