Posts Tagged ‘Projects’
Polar Rose AB
Friday, August 1st, 2008
August 1st 2008
Started:2008/08/01
Title: Front-end Developer
Hired as a front-end developer for this up and coming image service provider. Polar Rose helps users sort, search, and share their digital photos based on the photo content. Using superior computer vision technology Polar Rose can tell who’s in a photo. Polar Rose’s partners are photo sharing and media sites who use Polar Rose’s services to activate their users’ underserved digital photo archives, grow pageviews and increase ad revenues.
Responsibilities include all front-end code for the company’s website and search-engine, as well as especially developed web-applications for the use on partner sites. Usability, accessibility and coding standards is under my control. This means of course that my main tools are HTML, CSS, microformats and jQuery javascript library.
Polar Rose is a nice company to work for. Situated in the western harbour of Malmö, it attracts workers from all around the world. Currently employees work in Malmö, Warsaw, Nice and San Fransisco. The international environment brings with it a relaxed attitude and high professionalism. The job is interesting, and while fairly technical in nature, allows for a constant and quite steep learning curve.
Freelance vs. Employment
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
June 3rd 2008
Well, my job search is starting to pay off. I am starting to get call-backs, which is encouraging, but I feel the need to explain a few things in detal.
At heart I am a freelancer and I like the concept of moving between projects and being my own boss. This on the other hand, does not mean I am not looking for full-time employment. Actually, at this point in time (just starting out in a new country, looking for a house, trying to settle down) full-time employment would be a lot better, if only to stand on my own two feet.
Another drawback for a freelancer is that you need to have contacts, and returning clients, something that I also lack as most of mine are still back in the UK.
So does full-time employment mean that you have to stop being a freelancer?
I would say, “Not necessarily”. I mean, it depends on your outlook on things and how much time you can spare on weekends and evenings. Also, even full-time employment can be seen as a sort of freelancing. The jobmarket these days fluctuate not only between years but even between months. At least I know I can always fall back on freelancing if the market goes down. My motto has always been “Do not depend on anyone to keep you busy. If you want to do something – then do it”.
Doesn’t freelancing make you an unreliable employee?
I can not see why a freelancer would make a worse or better employee than someone who is not. I guess employers might be scared that the employee with a freelancing background might jump ship at some point, but surely this is the same for everyone these days. As a freelancer I take a certain pride in my loyalty to my clients and employers. I don’t care if it is a short project or a steady job. When I get hired I stay the course and work hard (because I take pride in my work) and make sure they know that my mind is in the now, not the next project. Frankly, there are only a few things that would make me consider leaving a full-time job contract:
- Bad management
- Expected excessive and un-compensated over-time
- Pass-the-bucket mentality of blame instead of focusing on solutions
- No more challenges and you reach Status Quo where you either are not allowed to or hampered in doing your job effectively.
Doesn’t full time employment make you an unreliable freelancer?
Can you have the cake and eat it too? Of course, with full-time employment I will not have the time to work on as many projects – but it gives me the chance to work on the projects that really matter to ME. I can cherry-pick the jobs. Ideally if I get a benevolent employer who don’t mind sharing my skills – or the skills I do not use in my day job, make a deal with them to take small unpaid leave to endulge. Most freelance artists and writers do that to their “day jobs”. Or they work in positions with 65-90% work – perfect. As long as it does not impact on the work produced, does not involve a competitor and it keeps the employee happy – then why should I not freelance?
Well that is in the ideal world. If that is not possible then there are still other avenues like evenings, weekends and holidays – like I have done for the 10 years before I went full-time freelancing. Turn around times might be a bit slower because of this so a 5 day job takes up to two weeks to complete but in general the production quality is the same if not better.
Anyway, end of rant.
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.
Dear world…
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
October 30th 2007
Sorry I haven’t updated this website in a while. I have had some quite hectic months, both privately and workwise, so had to put my blogging on hold for the moment. Needless to say, I can confess to leaving my job at 7city to start contracting. Indeed, I am going to try this out for real this time.
I have worked in mainly permanent positions for the last five years, but feel I will need more freedom and more variety if I am going to reach my goals within the foreseeable future.
My final day is November 2nd 2007, which will be celebrated in Reflex, the 80s bar. So from November 5th, we will see if I got what it takes.
So until next time… be well
