Posts Tagged ‘freelance’
Everybody speaks English
Monday, June 30th, 2008
June 30th 2008
I have had a few people asking me:-
“You are Swedish, and you are looking for work in Sweden. Why is your website only in English?”
Well, I have several reasons:
- I am not ONLY looking for work in Sweden – the world is my market place.I would like my website to be seen as international.
- Most people in Sweden have a grasp of English from school (it is compulsory for about 6 years) so really it is not a problem for most of them.
- The lingua franca of the internet age is English. At least until China has a proper democracy.
- I lived for eight years in London, so I still think and dream in English.
- English is a very beautiful language that lends itself well for graphical descriptions and poetical recitals (Yeah, as if you would find THAT here)
Freelancer in Sweden
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
May 22nd 2008
Since I am not a guy sitting on my laurels (or Hardys), I have taken a first step at freelancing in Sweden. It is a good way for me to get to know different types of industries, and for companies to find out what a reliable resource I can be. Plus, the hours are good.
I just signed up with Creative Section , where you can see my full CV . I guess I will have to pay for the full listing,but it is only a first step. Pretty soon everyone will know that I am back in town, open for business!
The Swedish business model
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
May 10th 2008
Have now relocated back to Sweden, and am seriously looking for new projects.
This is a completely different experience from looking in London, for sure.
So far I have found about 5 different roles in the area closest to me but will expand my search to include, but not be limited to:
- Kronobergs Län
- Kalmar Län
- Blekinge Län
- Skåne Län
- Västergötlands Län
Lets face it, I usually commuted for about an hour on the Tube in London – IF the trains were on time. The difference in Sweden is that I can work with a larger area AND the trains are on time. I will of course get myself a car as soon as possible to make it easier to travel, but first my priorities are:
- Get a job, sir
- Get a car
- Get a house/flat closer to work
As far as plans go, I know from experience that the simpler they are the better.
As for now, I will drive to the coast and have a swim – no matter how cold it is in the Baltic. Laters!
GT – Good Technology
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
April 3rd 2008
Started:2008/04/02
Ended: 2008/04/17
Title: Site Builder
Was hired as a freelance coder to mainly work on the Xbox Newsletter for Microsoft for the upcoming months (17 languages and used in 13 countries) and templates for the new ASDA.co.uk website. Working on existing code can be excruciating but managed to create a pretty good replica of the Xbox Newsletter that worked in all email readers and browsers – Yes that includes Google Mail, the most un-standard of browser email-clients. Was not able to test for Office 2007 and its new restrictionson HTML emails, but I hope I avoided most of the pits in the sand.
The ASDA.co.uk website was a hodge-podge of inherited code on a project that started back in early 2007. Needless to say, I was not the first coder to work on it, but defenitely one of the better ones. (My predecessor appearantly came in, sat down, looked at the code and promptly resigned) We were a team of 4 talented freelancers working on the site at any given time, fighting bugfixes with bugfixes. I seriously think we would have been better off completely revamping the code from scratch, because that way it could have been finished in one week instead of three.
But as it were, the team were already halfway through bugfixing and checking for compliance with IE6,IE7,IE8b,FF1,FF2, FF3b, Safari and Opera, as well as W3C standards. All you could do was spit in your hands and dig in. And you know what? We did it on time and on budget.
