Jack Barber / Website Design

Week Notes #2

Week Notes #2

Last week I enjoyed a trip up to Newcastle to visit a friend, discuss running a Forest School weekend for a church and a day out at FrontendNE - a conference for web designers.

I love a train journey. And the route from Whitby to Newcastle must be one of the most varied and picturesque journeys in the country. It's not a journey to be rushed - it takes about 3 hrs each way - but if you can afford the time it's well worth it. Even as an adult I still suffer from travel sickness if I try and read or work on any form of transport which is a wonderful excuse for just enjoying the view!

The picture is of a live demo at FrontendNE in which Remy Sharp showed us how he built a system to replicate the functionality of an ancient ZX Spectrum from 1984. In the demo he was able to take a photo on his phone, encode it into sound which he fed into an original Spectrum. The Spectrum decoded the sound and displayed the photo on the screen using it's wonderfully retro reduced colour pallette.

It was also great to hear from Jeremy Keith about service workers, which I hope to start using in projects very soon.

Back in the office on Thursday and Friday I was working closely with Esgrid, my part-time employee. We're building a new online booking system for bed and breakfasts, holiday lets and small agencies. We're hoping it'll be ready for testing by the end of this week. Our aim is to make the whole process simple - for both owners and customers.

Alongside this, here are a few links to projects complete in recent weeks:

Today I've been finishing a few little jobs which have been hanging around for ages. In the week ahead I hope to get more of these odd-jobs finished off, so I can turn my attention to some larger projects again and start looking to take on new projects from May/June onwards.