Mark Brown's journal

Gratitude

2022-12-21T00:00:00.000Z

Today I’m grateful that our basic needs are covered. Our family is healthy and safe. We have good stable jobs with great maternity leave. We have the loving support of parents, siblings and close friends. We live in the lucky country. We are achieving our goals.

Some recent setbacks aside, we’ve had a very good year and I choose today to focus on that.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
― George Carlin

Cars are a massive inconvenience

As of yesterday we are down to zero cars in our household because someone drove up the back of our stationary car. The driver got aggressive and argued that I must have snuck up behind him. Idiot Number One.

Someone else accidentally drove into the same car when it was parked a week earlier. This driver was honest enough to leave his details and a note and he’s lucky that the minor damage he caused has now been properly smashed in by Idiot Number One.

Our only other car has had multiple costly breakdowns over the last year. Even though it had only clocked 100k on the odometer the timing chain snapped destroying the engine beyond repair. The second engine has had multiple faulty fuel injectors and a leaking Exhaust Gas Recirculation Cooling unit. Our fingers are crossed that a new fuel injector will be the last thing required to get it running smoothly.

Silver lining

Both of these cars were gifts, we got three years use out of them and only had to pay for the cost of a new engine and some towing. Insurance have provided a new RAV4 for us while they assess things which is a much more comfortable ride. We ordered a new car with a twelve month wait but one became available nine months earlier than anticipated.

Our smashed car is unlikely to be repaired by the insurer so we’ll be paid out the cost of the vehicle which will go towards the new one. I happen to have a friend that fixes cars like this and gifts them to people in need. Hopefully he can find another use for it and give it a second life. If not, it’ll be scrapped for parts to benefit those same people.

Family

Childbirth was a wonderful experience for us. No complications or health issues for mum and bub, a massive win. The first week was the best week of my life and the cake trolley was off the charts. The cheeky lad is a lot of fun, most of the time. I like his little face.

We were able to travel with the family from Darwin to Cairns in a Maui campervan. Julian loved the warm water springs, rainforests and waterfalls, it was a great time to bond and explore some of our beautiful country together. We also got to Hamilton Island in QLD. I really appreciated that there were no cars allowed on the island, everyone gets around in golf buggies so the pollution and damage people can cause is limited. That didn’t stop Idiot Number Two flipping theirs upside down near our unit.

Financial independence

Money is a taboo topic that I don’t mind talking about, it’s increasingly important for me. Over the last 18 months our progress to financial independence has increased from 13.75% to 22.5%. What this means is that we could not work for 82 days of the year and our basic living expenses would be covered by passive income. So far we’ve bought back 82 days of the year, every year.

It’s true that that we still have a long way to go, this is a big goal and it will take patience to achieve. However, we’re only planning to accumulate until we reach 50%. Then we’ll simply need to cover our expenses, leave our investments alone and wait for compounding to do the rest of the work. That’s the plan anyway. The purpose of this nest egg is to buy us our time back, I’m feeling good about our progress towards that goal.

As Forrest Gump said, not needing to worry about money is good. One less thing.

Next year

In no particular order I’m looking forward to:

A close friends wedding in Bali in January.
A Vipassana 10-day meditation course, something I’ve wanted to do for years.
Witnessing more of Julian’s firsts: walking, talking, getting up to no good.
A new plug-in car and Australia’s first 10 year warranty.
More time with family and friends.
Increased giving.
Getting back into a routine with work in the office and training.

Money

2021-12-01T00:00:00.000Z

This is simply how me and my partner think about money, our overall strategy and the lessons we’ve learned over the past few years.

It’s not personal financial advice. Your situation could be different to mine and you might have different goals. Still, I think there’s valuable lessons in here that could apply to many different situations, otherwise I wouldn’t be sharing it.

Life is full of uncertainty.

While there’s a lot we can’t control, you can control how you spend, save and invest money. Up to a certain point, It can have a big impact on your wellbeing. Being good with money can give you options when you are faced with difficulties like a recession, big unexpected expenses, losing a job or getting sick. And ultimately, you have more freedom to choose where you spend your time when you have cash at hand and passive income.

Overall strategy

The Barefoot Steps are the primary strategy me and my partner use. It’s a low risk strategy with a strong focus on savings and debt reduction:

Automate your savings by splitting your pay as it comes in
Put your Super in a low-cost index fund
Insure yourself against things that will sink you financially
Keep a cash buffer for emergencies
Eliminate your debts
Save up a 20% deposit and buy a home
Make extra contributions to super
Pay off your mortgage and re-negotiate to keep paying the lowest variable rate

Beyond this we are investing in shares outside of super:

15% at the start of the pay cycle
Anything left over at the end of the pay cycle
We plan to invest in larger chunks when there’s a discount

We have modest achievable goals:

Own our home
Have no debts
Have a sustainable growing income stream
Have a large amount saved up in super for retirement

We don’t budget but we do track our progress at start of the month.

Inflation

Money becomes less valuable over time. The future is going to be very expensive.

If you saved up $10,000 in 1970 and parked in a bank account in ten years time it would only have retained 37% of it’s value. By 1990 it would only be worth 17% as much!

You’d still have 10k in the bank but it would buy you far less:

In 1980 you would need $26,956.52 to buy something of equal value.
In 1990 you would need $58,772.37 to buy something of equal value.

This is because inflation went through the roof over these two decades.

The RBA’s Inflation Calculator shows how the value of the Aussie dollar has devalued over time.

I picked the two worst recent decades to prove a point that high inflation is scary and can throw your savings plan out the window. Inflation these days is targeted to remain between 2-3% per year. That means that if your money isn’t increasing by at least that rate you’re losing value. That’s the reason we need to invest in other asset classes.

Assets

Buying assets that appreciate in value like property or generate an income like shares in a business greater than the rate of inflation is key to becoming and staying wealthy over time.

The Vanguard Index Chart shows the growth of $10,000 over 30 years with no acquisition costs or taxes and all income reinvested into different asset classes.

There’s short term fluctuations and a few crashes. It’s still clear to me when looking at these with the perspective of time that Shares, Property and Bonds have all grown faster than inflation shown as the red line at the bottom for CPI.

I see investing in quality businesses as the clear winning asset. I’m sure the businesses of tomorrow will continue to earn profits. Personally, I’m 100% invested in shares inside and outside of super as opposed to other “safer” assets like Bonds and Cash.

Compound interest

That “all income reinvested” part above is key. Without this you lose out on compound interest, the effect of earning interest on your interest over time. In my view the best kinds of investments are those you can hold for the long term, growing slowly at first but snowballing into very large amounts by re-investing the income.

The light blue bars at the top are the growing interest payments over time. Even though you’re putting in the same amount of money each month you’re receiving more income from your investments as time goes on.

Money Smart’s Compound Interest Calculator shows the effect of time and re-investing the income.

How we save and invest

Before we are paid we salary sacrifice to Super, as much as we can up to the concessional cap. This is a sure way to build up a tidy sum for retirement, paying less tax and putting our saving on autopilot. My Super is 100% invested in shares.

After we are paid 15% goes towards the mortgage. This is a conservative move at a time with rock bottom interest rates around 2%. We could chase greater gains elsewhere but this is working towards our goal of being debt free and provides us with some safety.

We send another 15% into Aus, US and international shares through index-tracking ETFs. By doing this we are owning a growing slice of the most profitable businesses around the world. We receive dividends from these businesses quarterly and re-invest them. This is growing a sustainable passive income stream, I don’t ever plan on selling these.

We move 10% into a saver for holidays. I don’t count this as savings, it’s really just delayed spending. It’s something that we intentionally and happily spend on.

Any excess at the end of the month we invest. And if there’s a crash we’ll buy more shares at a discount with money available in our Redraw.

Tracking

We don’t budget. We automate our savings instead as explained above.

On the first of the month we do take a look back on the previous month though. Noting the value of all income, debts, and assets.

We take a quick look through our spending and saving patterns to keep ourselves accountable. Tools like Monthly Insights and Upcoming in Up make this easy to do.

This takes around 10 minutes.

These are some example numbers to show what it looks like.

  
    Income
    Nov 1, 21
    Dec 1, 21
  
    Salary
    10,000
    10,000
  
    Dividends
    
    150
  
    Interest
    10
    12
  
    Other
    150
    500
  
    Debt
    
    Mortgage
    428,000
    425,000 (-3,000)
  
    Assets
    
    House Equity
    202,000
    203,000 (+1,000)
  
    Redraw
    70,000
    72,000 (+2,000)
  
    Super
    200,000
    202,000 (+2,000)
  
    Cash
    10,000
    11,000 (+1,000)
  
    Shares
    20,000
    22,000 (+2,000)
  
    Net Worth
    $502,000
    $510,000 (+8,000)

Income	Nov 1, 21	Dec 1, 21
Salary	10,000	10,000
Dividends		150
Interest	10	12
Other	150	500
Debt
Mortgage	428,000	425,000 (-3,000)
Assets
House Equity	202,000	203,000 (+1,000)
Redraw	70,000	72,000 (+2,000)
Super	200,000	202,000 (+2,000)
Cash	10,000	11,000 (+1,000)
Shares	20,000	22,000 (+2,000)
Net Worth	$502,000	$510,000 (+8,000)

We visualise our cash flow and asset growth and can easily understand how our overall strategy is working.

Cashflow

I am not concerned about fluctuations or crashes in the share price, in fact I’m looking forward to them for the opportunity to buy at a discount.

Rather than the share price, we watch the growing dividends over time. This validates the strategy and provides passive income to re-invest.

The share price is only important at the time you want to sell, which I don’t plan to do.

Time in market

We’ve been ok with money in the past. We’ve always been able to save, avoided debt and haven’t spent big on depreciating assets like cars. My biggest mistake is putting so little into Super and other investments when I was young and freelancing. I’m 35 now and are really only just getting started building a passive income stream.

This example from the Barefoot investor really struck home that it’s simply time that has the biggest impact on good investments.

Scenario:

You invest $5,000 every year for 10 years and then stop. You invest a total of $50,000.

Your friend then starts investing $5,000 every year for then next 35 years. They invest a total of $175,000.

The investment earns a consistent return of 10%. Which is actually less than what shares have returned over the past 30 years.

The end result is that your investment grows to be worth over 1 million dollars more than your friends. That’s the power of time and compound interest.

  
    Age
    You invest
    Your friend invests
  
    15
    $5,000
    $5,500
    
    16
    $5,000
    $11,550
    
    17
    $5,000
    18,205
    
    18
    $5,000
    $25,526
    
    19
    $5,000
    $33,578
    
    20
    $5,000
    $42,436
    
    21
    $5,000
    $52,179
    
    22
    $5,000
    $62,897
    
    23
    $5,000
    $74,687
    
    24
    $5,000
    $87,656
    
    25
    
    $96,421
    $5,000
    $5,500
  
    26
    
    $106,064
    $5,000
    $11,550
  
    27
    
    $116,670
    $5,000
    $18,205
  
    28
    
    $128,337
    $5,000
    $25,526
  
    29
    
    $141,171
    $5,000
    $33,578
  
    30
    
    $155,288
    $5,000
    $42,436
  
    31
    
    $170,816
    $5,000
    $52,179
  
    32
    
    $187,898
    $5,000
    $62,897
  
    33
    
    $206,688
    $5,000
    $74,687
  
    34
    
    $227,357
    $5,000
    $87,656
  
    35
    
    $250,092
    $5,000
    $101,921
  
    36
    
    $275,102
    $5,000
    $117,614
  
    37
    
    $302,612
    $5,000
    $134,875
  
    38
    
    $332,873
    $5,000
    $153,862
  
    39
    
    $366,160
    $5,000
    $174,749
  
    40
    
    $402,776
    $5,000
    $197,724
  
    41
    
    $443,054
    $5,000
    $222,996
  
    42
    
    $487,359
    $5,000
    $250,795
  
    43
    
    $536,095
    $5,000
    $281,375
  
    44
    
    $589,705
    $5,000
    $315,012
  
    45
    
    $648,675
    $5,000
    $352,014
  
    46
    
    $713,543
    $5,000
    $392,715
  
    47
    
    $784,897
    $5,000
    $437,487
  
    48
    
    $863,387
    $5,000
    $486,735
  
    49
    
    $949,725
    $5,000
    $540,909
  
    50
    
    $1,044,698
    $5,000
    $600,500
  
    51
    
    $1,149,167
    $5,000
    $666,050
  
    52
    
    $1,264,084
    $5,000
    $738,155
  
    53
    
    $1,390,493
    $5,000
    $817,470
  
    54
    
    $1,529,542
    $5,000
    $904,717
  
    55
    
    $1,682,496
    $5,000
    $1,000,689
  
    56
    
    $1,850,746
    $5,000
    $1,106,258
  
    57
    
    $2,035,820
    $5,000
    $1,222,383
  
    58
    
    $2,239,402
    $5,000
    $1,350,122
  
    59
    
    $2,463,343
    $5,000
    $1,490,634
  
    60
    
    $2,709,677
    $5,000
    $1,645,197

Age	You invest	Your friend invests
15	$5,000	$5,500
16	$5,000	$11,550
17	$5,000	18,205
18	$5,000	$25,526
19	$5,000	$33,578
20	$5,000	$42,436
21	$5,000	$52,179
22	$5,000	$62,897
23	$5,000	$74,687
24	$5,000	$87,656
25		$96,421	$5,000	$5,500
26		$106,064	$5,000	$11,550
27		$116,670	$5,000	$18,205
28		$128,337	$5,000	$25,526
29		$141,171	$5,000	$33,578
30		$155,288	$5,000	$42,436
31		$170,816	$5,000	$52,179
32		$187,898	$5,000	$62,897
33		$206,688	$5,000	$74,687
34		$227,357	$5,000	$87,656
35		$250,092	$5,000	$101,921
36		$275,102	$5,000	$117,614
37		$302,612	$5,000	$134,875
38		$332,873	$5,000	$153,862
39		$366,160	$5,000	$174,749
40		$402,776	$5,000	$197,724
41		$443,054	$5,000	$222,996
42		$487,359	$5,000	$250,795
43		$536,095	$5,000	$281,375
44		$589,705	$5,000	$315,012
45		$648,675	$5,000	$352,014
46		$713,543	$5,000	$392,715
47		$784,897	$5,000	$437,487
48		$863,387	$5,000	$486,735
49		$949,725	$5,000	$540,909
50		$1,044,698	$5,000	$600,500
51		$1,149,167	$5,000	$666,050
52		$1,264,084	$5,000	$738,155
53		$1,390,493	$5,000	$817,470
54		$1,529,542	$5,000	$904,717
55		$1,682,496	$5,000	$1,000,689
56		$1,850,746	$5,000	$1,106,258
57		$2,035,820	$5,000	$1,222,383
58		$2,239,402	$5,000	$1,350,122
59		$2,463,343	$5,000	$1,490,634
60		$2,709,677	$5,000	$1,645,197

Your friend could keep investing $5,000 every year until they are 500 years old and they’d never catch up with you.

Set and forget

Our strategy is largely automated and out of mind. Regular saving and investing every month, up front rather than an afterthought. Our choice of investments might change in the future but I’m pretty bullish on this strategy working long term without us having to actively manage it.

I don’t see anything replacing businesses as the best thing to invest in, that’s where everyone spends their time and energy. If the whole world economy changed to built upon Dogecoin there would still be businesses operating to earn that coin.

Grow your own food

2021-08-09T00:00:00.000Z

Growing my own vegetables and herbs is one of the most rewarding things I do. The first year I got serious in the garden I grew 30 varieties of tomatoes. From sowing to harvest through to seed collection these plants make me happy.

I’ve learned a lot about the natural world and have been able to enjoy a great variety of healthy, delicious and free food all year round. Here’s a few tips to encourage you to give it a try. Plants want to grow, anyone can do it.

Time

Just before Spring is the perfect time to be preparing for the productive growing season and thinking about what you want to grow. In Melbourne, August and September are the ideal time to sow many of my favourite crops — Tomato, Basil, Lettuce, Capsicum, Chilli, Carrots, Cucumber, Zucchini, Pumpkin, Potato, Beetroot and Melons.

See a Planting guide for what’s ready to plant now. It can help you plan ahead so that your garden is always full, even during winter.

Variety

One of the very best things about growing your own food is that you can enjoy a much greater variety than you can find in shops. Broadly speaking, the varieties you find in shops are ones that were selectively chosen year after year that were resistant to pest and disease, uniform in shape and size and looked great on the shelf making them easy to sell. Nothing in there about taste or variety. Choose vegetables and herbs you enjoy eating most and are suitable to your available space. Look up tasting notes and try growing a variety you haven’t tasted before.

Space

Draw up an outline of the available space you have. Plants can get surprisingly large so watch videos on how different plants grow. Giving enough space between plants will help them grow large and stay healthy, however some things grow very well in small clumps(things like onions, leeks, beetroot, peas, radish).

Pots are always an option if you don’t have space on the ground. With stakes you can grow things like tomatoes and cucumber vertically and produce a lot of food in a small space.

Seedlings

I first started by buying seedlings from a local organic nursery. It’s the easiest and quickest way to begin with healthy sturdy plants ready to go into the ground.

Only root vegetables like carrots with a long tap root or potatoes need to be sown directly into the ground. Most other plants will grow very well being planted in trays indoors first and then transplanted into the garden once they’ve reached a good size. You can better control the temperature, water and light and keep them away from pests while they’re most vulnerable.

Eden Seeds and Diggers have a great range of quality heirloom seed.

Soil

You can learn what healthy soil looks like by observing a forest floor. As plant and animal life die they fall on top of the ground, decompose and break down into food for fungi, insects and micro organisms. The top soil is kept covered with leaves, branches and plants - a mulch that preserves moisture in the soil and sustains the life beneath the surface.

Putting 1-2 inches of compost on the top of your soil once a year is all you need to do to feed the soil and act as a mulch. You can add organic fertilisers to feed plants directly but that’s not required. Feeding the soil with compost will grow healthy soil and in turn grow healthy plants.

Charles Dowding - No dig explained in 3 minutes

Home made compost is the best thing for your garden, it’s free and it saves waste from going to landfill too. Hot composting is the fastest method but you do need a fair amount of material(1m cube) to generate enough heat for it to work properly. It will still turn into compost eventually with less, it’ll just take longer.

Simply pile up a 50/50 mix of greens(grass, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds) to browns(dry leaves, wood chips, cardboard) into a big heap in thin layers and wait. Turning the pile will speed up the process but isn’t required.

Sun

Most plants grow best in full direct sun, leafy greens and herbs are the exceptions that can grow well with less.

Water

2-3 times a week should be enough for most plants. You want to keep on top of the watering in the early stages of growth and then you can taper off and water less. Overwatering can lead to less flavourful fruit and delayed harvest. Water around the base of the plants where possible, watering leaves can encourage fungal diseases.

Pests

Keep an eye on the garden and watch what’s happening. When you’re watering look out for signs of damage or larvae. In an organic garden you should expect to suffer some losses to pests or disease but you shouldn’t ever need to use any pesticides.

Netting and covers for birds.
Picking off slugs and caterpillars by hand.
Using a dish soap spray for flying insects like aphids.
Prune lower leaves when they start to yellow, it will remove food for pests.

Harvest

Pick early and often. You can harvest at any time, you don’t need to wait for things to reach their full size. Lots of plants give a continual harvest, you don’t need to pull up the whole plant to enjoy. Lettuces for example, you can pick the lower leaves every few days and it will keep growing. Broccoli will send up side shoots after the main head which you can keep regularly harvesting.

Jar and preserve what you can, we’ve done this with tomatoes for the last two years and haven’t needed to buy any canned tomatoes throughout the year.

Seed saving

I’ve found saving seed very rewarding. It’s free, fun and your garden can become self sustaining by keeping your own favourite varieties alive. You simply leave the plant in the ground and the seed will be ready to collect with it’s completely brown and dry.

Large dry seeds like beans, peas, pumpkin are easiest to save. Just leave them on a bench to completely dry out before storing otherwise they will grow mould and spoil.

Wet seeds like tomatoes and cucumbers have a jelly coating which inhibits growth until the season is right. You can dissolve the jelly by leaving in water for a few days, giving it a stir once a while and rinsing under a tap. Then leave on the bench for a few days to completely dry out.

Lighter seeds like lettuce or basil or brassica’s you can rub between your hands to free the seed from their husks and then use the winnowing technique to blow away the lighter material.

Workaholism in tech

2021-07-24T00:00:00.000Z

My workaholism came in waves but there were consistent habits throughout my career that lead me towards burning out. Habits that I’m wanting to change before the shit hits the fan.

  This is the definition of workaholism that I’m running with:  

Feeling compelled to work because of internal pressures.
Having persistent thoughts about work when not working.
Working beyond what is reasonably expected of the worker (as established by the requirements of the job or basic economic needs) despite the potential for negative consequences (e.g., marital issues).

  And this is the definition of burnout:

 Burnout is a state of mental and physical exhaustion that can zap the joy out of your career, friendships, and family interactions.

 I began last week fatigued and unbalanced.  I had difficulty falling asleep and would wake up regularly around 4am to sit at the computer. Physically weak from lack of exercise and exhaustion, my eyes were sore, my head and wrists hurt. My work week felt like I was achieving nothing, my focus was split and I had trouble concentrating. I knew something wasn’t right, but it’d been slowly growing for years. I was the frog being boiled alive by bad habits.

I had a lot of excuses but no real reason to be working. My work environment was great, projects were well-planned and managed, I had a supportive team, unlimited leave, encouragement and little stress. I was working compulsively, not intentionally.

  I’ve experienced workaholism twice in my 15 year career in tech.  Both times I was highly engaged and ambitious, taking lead on projects I wanted to succeed. Both times lead to a loss of job satisfaction and the desire to leave. My problems were internal not external.  

What I was experiencing was hard for others to spot, to all but my partner of course. She’d regularly voice frustration at my work hours, working weekends, being tied to my phone when I was away from the computer. I was neglecting personal care and duties to my family. This was a recipe for disaster. But, I’m on the mend.

Techniques

I’ve been thinking about techniques I can use to spot warning signs in myself and others in measurable ways.

  Let’s start with Git.

You can easily find times you’ve committed changes on certain days and times. Which days and times are problematic? That’ll depend on you and how you want to work. For me, it’s not a good sign when I’m working on Saturdays, Sundays, before 9am, and after 6pm. Working remotely it’s easier to not stop.

 git log --author=markbrown4 --pretty='format:%h %cd' | grep -E "(Sat|Sun)"  
 git log --author=markbrown4 --pretty='format:%h %cd' | grep -E "(00|01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|18|19|20|21|22|23|24):[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]"

 Next up, Slack .

https://your-org.slack.com/stats 

The access logs and analytics can help you find if you’re using it at an unhealthy level. What’s an unhealthy level? Again, that depends on you. For me, multiple times a day, every day, forever is clearly unhealthy.

  A communication tool like Slack is essential for a lot of companies. Slack on your phone though? I’m increasingly convinced it’s a bad thing. I’d look at it compulsively when I didn’t want to be. When I was taking a walk outdoors. When I was sitting down with my partner in the evening. I would read every unread, every customer review, all day long. It was an interruption to both my work life and personal life and it can go in the bin.  

Limit your total screen time, there is more to life. On macs start tracking under System Settings > Screen Time

Find out how much leave you’ve taken.  

Start recording the length and quality of your sleep .

Recovery 

Enforce work hours of your choosing.  Delete slack from your phone. Limit your screen time.  Exercise.  Eat well. Take leave. Spend your new found free time with friends and family.

  Even if you’re locked down in the middle of a pandemic. Do things that restore you. For me some of those things are gardening, being in nature, playing with my dog, cooking, exercise, quality time with my partner and reading.

 I’m convinced meditation is good for me but have only scratched the surface, I would love to go deeper.

Barefoot

2018-09-07T00:00:00.000Z

I am a big fan of the Barefoot Investor, this entertaining and helpful book gives simple step by step instructions that any Aussie can follow to become financially secure. His advice is sound and will help you to protect yourself and your family.

I’ve always been a good saver. I was content with less and avoided debt like the plague, I’ve never owned a credit card. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed reading and applying the Barefoot strategy because it helped me put our finances on autopilot.

Here’s a summary of his strategy:

Plant

Setup your accounts - Rather than budgeting, split your income into four categories as it comes in to limit your spending.

2 Everyday accounts:

Daily Expenses: 60% of your income. For living expenses like food, transport and insurance.
Splurge: 10% of your income. Spend guilt-free on whatever makes you happy.

3 Savings accounts:

Smile: 10% of your income. Bigger things like holidays and weddings.
Fire Extinguisher: 20% of your income. Pay off debts and save up a deposit.
Mojo: Cash at hand for emergencies: $2,000 to start.

Get your Super sorted - Go with the lowest fee paying Index Fund you can find.

Get your Insurance sorted

Top level hospital cover with a $500 excess through private health insurance.
12 times your annual salary of combined Life and TPD plus Income protection for 75% of your wage til you reach 65 through your super.

Eliminate your debts - Re-negotiate and pay off any debts from smallest to largest with your Fire Extinguisher.

Grow

Save a 20% deposit on your home loan with your Fire Extinguisher.

Buy your home

Boost your Super to 15% - Add an additional 5.5% with pre-tax salary sacrifice.

Boost Mojo to 3 months Daily Expenses with your Fire Extinguisher.

Harvest

Pay off your mortgage with your Fire Extinguisher.

Re-negotiate your home loan when you’ve paid off 20% of the loan.

Boost your Mojo to 3-5 years of daily expenses with Fire Extinguisher into Super cash account.

–

Additional steps:

Write your will and detail all accounts for your family.

Be generous and leave a legacy.

–

Read the book!

Two years in Europe

2018-08-09T00:00:00.000Z

On June 8, 2016 Trish and I moved to London on a Youth Mobility Visa for two years, it was great!

We based ourselves in South London, Trish had a few friends around the Clapham / Brixton area that we stayed with during our first few weeks in London. Trish started work with Visit Victoria the day after we landed, I had a few good leads from friends and after a few interviews joined Equal Experts, a successful agile consultancy.

Here’s a few things I’ll miss:

London summers are the best summers - Many evenings were spent in the parks and commons in sunny 19 degree weather. The sun is up from 5am to 9:30pm leaving plenty of time after work for drinks in the park with friends.
The accents & languages - One of the most multi-cultural cities in the world.
The free museums and galleries - Make good on Britain’s centuries of looting and colonising.
The pubs - Beers come warm and cheap, the bars are cosy and charming and the bitter will grow on you.
Entertainment - Theatre, outdoor/undercover cinema, music and food festivals, ice skating.
Travel opportunity - Having never been to Europe before we were kids in a candy shop away on weekend trips every fortnight. A cheap fare and an hours travel and you’re in a different country, Australia is very isolated in comparison.

London is a transient city, It seemed that the majority were living here only temporarily, like us.

Adolescence

I’ve grown up a lot these last two years, learning a lot of history along the way. Trish and I have been on over fifteen walking tours through European cities and visited over forty museums & galleries. We travelled with friends and created lasting memories of beautiful parts of the world with good people. Food tours and galleries were highlights but so were the places marked by death like Auschwitz and Gallipoli.

We visited over thirty countries and took more extensive road trips around these:

England, Ireland, Scotland
Italy
Spain
Morocco
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
Turkey

The UK countryside, Italy, Greece & the Netherlands were some of our favourite places to relax. My work was stress-free and I was able to make valuable contributions to teams that respected each other.

The good life

I don’t expect I’ll be travelling as much in the coming years and I’m totally fine with that, I should be so lucky as to call Australia home. These are the things I’m looking forward to for a happy life:

Good food & friends
More time with family
More music & art
A dog
A vegetable and herb garden
An exercise room
No money problems
Panettone

Abroad

2014-05-28T00:00:00.000Z

I describe travel as one of the greatest privileges and educators, I hope to continue traveling and learning from different cultures and history for as long as my legs will carry me. Still, after a three month trip through India and Nepal and another five months in the Philippines I find myself missing home.

I found Indians to be playful yet fond of intellectual argument, the sub-continent boasts a wealth of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and it’s spiritualism touches every part. India is a fascinating place that I would love to see again one day.

For someone very interested in understanding world religions and spirituality I found it to be a treasure housing every major religion in the world, fundamental to this diversity is the Indian’s deep tolerance of others. One clear demonstration of India’s religious harmony are the caves of Ellora - home to 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cave temples. For more than a two kilometer stretch these ancient temples of the three religions rest side by side peacefully, in my mind I could hear the songs of a hundred monks with hammer in hand chiseling and chanting.

Being adopted by a group of friends in Hyderabad was an experience I won’t forget either, meeting their families and being taken to their hangouts I learned of an Indian’s love for his friends, their hospitality and sentimentality.

Indian food is healthy and delicious pretty much everywhere, I half expected to be eating the westernized Indian take out I was used to - Naan slathered in butter and heavy Punjab curries. Instead I found healthy vegetarian curries and Dosa, spicy Biryani’s and enjoyed the ritual of sharing Masala Chai, brewed in the freshly squeezed milk from the cow that just passed.

The Himalayas are breathtakingly beautiful, resting after a full day of trekking at the worlds peak with fresh Momo and Dal Bhat is as good for the soul as it is for the body. I remember the relief that I felt each day we reached our destination and warming myself by the fire, chatting with fellow trekkers, our friendly guide and porter.

The physical aspect is challenging and the solitude helps to separate you from your life back home, making your mind still to better appreciate the natural wonder of the mountains. Trekking in Nepal is a wonderful rewarding experience in one of the most naturally beautiful places on earth.

Filipino’s are carefree, good natured, inclusive and know how to have fun and they need little more than a basketball ring stapled to a tree and some rice to get by. Fiesta’s, dance routines and pageants get everyone together for a good laugh or sing along. Filipino’s tease each other in jest all the time, no one is offended when they’re called baboy(pig) for being fat for example, it’s never said in a hurtful way and so the laughs continue.

Another oddity is how they celebrate and encourage gays, just last week we attended the local Miss Gay 2014 (a pageant for ladyboys) - the highlight for me was when one them chair surfed in high heels into a cartwheel finishing on the floor with a splits. There’s so many ridiculous things here that you find yourself laughing, surprised and often shocked by what you see.

And, the mangos and baby back ribs are delicious.

Working abroad

Given my love of travel you may think that I chose to work abroad whilst traveling around the Philippines, that’s not the case. In fact, the idea of traveling around whilst working has never really appealed to me. I have always tried to separate my travel from my work so that I can be completely present at any given moment, I don’t want my travel experience to be diluted or for my work to be broken up into managed chunks of time. Travel for me is a rejuvinating escape from my work and I want to protect that aspect of it. Life had brought me here because I wanted to be with my gal who had taken up a volunteer position, remote work enabled me to be here without sacrificing my work as well.

Working from home is often glorified but personally I haven’t found it to be ideal. I’ve had to work much harder to achieve a good work / life balance from home, interruptions happen frequently and it’s easy to mis-communicate with my colleagues back home, my physical fitness has fallen through the floor and I have a tendency to overwork leaving me depleted at the end of the day. These types of issues are discussed in detail in Remote - office not required and I know that I can do things to help with each of these areas, it’s an issue of discipline for the most part. However, working alone from home simply isn’t as fun or motivating for me as being in a room full of passionate people.

The environment where I find myself comes with it’s own challenges too, the temperature is consistently in the mid thirties, there are short but regular power / internet / water outs, and there’s niggling annoyances like getting extremely itchy after showering and tummy bugs. These small things taken together can be frustrating when you require long stretches of focused effort to complete a task.

Remote work is wonderful though! It’s enabled me to be here with someone I love and despite my gripes with my working environment I’ve had a lot of fun whilst I’ve been here. I’m thankful to Adioso for enabling me to work away from home and look forward to seeing the team in person again in a few more months. Whilst I appreciate all of the benefits and freedom that comes with working remotely I find it easier and more satisfying being close to my team.

Home

I’ve had some eye opening experiences in India, Nepal and the Philippines and wouldn’t pass them up if given those choices again. I’m becoming more mindful of the sacrifices that I make when I do travel though, in four months I’ll be home again and happy to be so.

Seeing my two year old nephew and able to have a little conversation this time
Riding around on my bicycle looking for coffee and hamburgers
Working closely with my team and friends at the office
Catching up with friends and family

Enjoying all the comforts of home.

Client-side MVC

2013-07-09T00:00:00.000Z

What role should frameworks play in the front-end architecture of rich web applications? People are working hard on frameworks to give us a more powerful, easier way to build the types of applications that have become common (single page applications). I find myself agreeing with Jeremy Ashkenas that these all-singing, all-dancing frameworks are not the answer - a minimal framework that leaves you in control of when things happen and doesn’t make assumptions about your UI is a much better place to start.

The end game

We are setting out to build interactions on the web that look and feel like native applications. The biggest challenge that web applications face in achieving this is the network, we rely on making requests across the internet to fetch and update data. A large part of making an application feel native is remaining in control of what and when we request data from web servers.

By default, HTML is requested from a server and parsed by the browser discarding all of the state from previous requests. We follow a link to move around, when we do this we trash and rebuild the ‘native environment’ on the client with each request. If the HTML contains references to other assets it needs(images, CSS, JavaScript) they are requested by the browser automatically.

Having server-side techniques like russian-doll caching and turbolinks to make requests just fast enough isn’t the answer, though their speed gains are impressive and worthwhile we still need to be able to manipulate important details with JavaScript. Stop drawing dead fish by Bret Victor is a brilliant articulation of why we should embrace the digital nature of the web to get the best experiences out of it. The fact is that JavaScript gives us a much richer environment to work with, it allows us to store and maintain application state inside the browser, gain control over network requests and respond to user interaction instantly without waiting for the network. We can respond to interactions programatically, close to the metal where it counts.

The end result is for us to take JavaScript seriously.

What’s not a problem

Fetching HTML from the server is perfectly fine and has been the foundation of the web since the beginning, there are great tools and frameworks to help us build HTML and being dogmatic about squeezing all of this content into JSON doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s still often the best method.

The time when rendering HTML server side becomes sub-par is when you need to dynamically change the DOM based on user interaction, relying on a web server to construct our UI simply will not do in these cases. If we already have the data we need, waiting for the network to provide us with a UI is slow and is the heart of the reason for client-side frameworks.

Solving the problem

Models and Views

Our content needs to live in two places on the client, in HTML so the users can see and interact with it, as well as in JavaScript objects so that we can manipulate it programatically. All frameworks provide us with Models to give structure to our data in JavaScript and Views for responding to events and updating our HTML.

Events

Having Views respond to changes in a Model is a great help in decoupling components. If one piece of code makes a change to a model it doesn’t need to know about all the views making use of it. Each view can listen to changes in the models that it needs to know about and apply relevant updates to the page.

Ajax

Rather than blowing away our environment with full page requests we need to be able to fetch new content when appropriate and update our models and views with new data. Keeping local models allows us to make use of data in the page without asking the server what the current state is every time.

Templates

Templates are just a clean way for us to turn JavaScript objects into HTML. They are necesary if we want to be able to construct HTML client-side cleanly.

URL’s

We only need URL’s for sharing a particular view that needs to be accessible.
I have never once needed to share or load a specific URL inside GMail, I’d argue that URL’s aren’t important to that application. When we do have distinct pages of our application Pjax is a great solution for rendering new views into the page fast whilst keeping the shell of our application the same.

Remain in control

My biggest beef with frameworks like Angular and Ember is that they take control from you, do too much, making too many assumptions along the way about your UI and what features the authors deem important. Both frameworks take control of when and how the DOM is rendered, you don’t get to choose when this occurs, it’s just part of the magic. The entire page is rendered by the machine, you are just there to pass the machine some inital instructions and then you sit back and watch it behave.

When you adopt a heavyweight framework and say “This is an angular/ember application”, from there on in you are encouraged to use their methods from start to finish, the whole hog. Angular encourages you to write HTML templates with a lot of embedded logic and attribute hooks in your HTML to prevent the boilerplate being in JavaScript. I find this littering of the HTML templates ugly and a mix of concerns.
Ember makes a feature of fetching data automatically for you as the data is required and updating the view for you, great right? No.
We need to be able to control network requests for data and to control how our DOM is updated to achieve a polished result.

A feature that is always in demos for these frameworks is two way binding.
“Behold! As I type in this text box you see before you, the views are updated automatically! I don’t need to write any code to make this happen.” It’s a neat magic trick but it’s not a particular UI pattern that I want or need, I would rather be pulling the strings and choosing when things happen.

A life sentence

Another concern I have is that if things turn bad, or another better framework is written you can’t change frameworks or scale back, you’re in rewrite terriority. So, be sure you want to use this framework forever before signing up.

Size matters

On the web it’s best to be small. I’ve always believed that you should have read, understood and agree with a framework before you adopt it. These are the development versions of Ember, Angular, jQuery and Backbone full of comments just waiting for you to read them.
Skimming through Backbone and jQuery it’s easy to get a feel for how things are structured, Ember and Angular are beasts already and they’re still in their infancy.

lines of code

Ember - 30,971
Angular - 14,847
jQuery - 8,880
Backbone - 1,572

Mobile

The best mobile experiences I have had online are ones with minimal JavaScript and CSS3. I know that devices will continue to improve and allow for more heavyweight applications but we’re not there yet, the size and constant updating of the DOM will never be as fast as applications that focus on less.

Code speaks

Nicholas Zakas’ presentation Enough with the JavaScript already! got a lot of attention recently, one slide in particular resonated with me. As rich web applications are developed the time spent on JS grows inproportionally to the rest of the application, I’ve seen it happen.

Keeping any complex web application maintainable is a difficult task, it requires keeping things small, putting a lot of thought into decoupled components, as well as foresight into how the components will be used in the future. Every time we add a component we’re writing API’s for future use. I find it much easier to maintain a client-side application when you can choose the right set of tools and are not governed by strict rules, flexibility is key.

Perhaps rendering HTML on the server is the simplest and best thing for an interaction.
Maybe a small targetted javascript library does just what you need.
Perhaps a component that initialises itself based on hooks in the HTML.
Maybe using strict REST will be more inefficient than it could be.
Hopefully tomorrow’s templating language will be better than today’s.

There are so many small decisions to be made when crafting an application, you must remain in control over the code execution and be able to choose appropriate tools. Frameworks that make too many of these decisions for you do away with flexibility.

One right way

There isn’t one.

The complexity and tools you use on the front-end should entirely depend on your UI. What is the simplest, fastest, most enjoyable interface we can build to help our users do something? This is the main reason why a minimal framework like Backbone is best, it doesn’t make any assumptions yet gives us practical tools to help us solve the real problems.

Rules of thumb

Don’t aim to create a single-page app
Create as few pages as possible
Keep your JavaScript small
Use libraries that you have read and agree with
Render HTML on the server initially
Use Pjax to change between pages
Use Backbone Views and Models for complex components.

This won’t always be the best path, it does work for a lot of real web applications though.

Bad presentations

2013-06-17T00:00:00.000Z

I gave a god-awful presentation last week at MelbJS. It was actually the second time I gave the presentation on d3 and it was a little worse than the first time, which was also bad.

Giving a bad presentation is still worthwhile

It means that you’re wanting to share something that you’re interested in and you are willing to be outside of your comfort zone. One of the things I like most about working on the web is that ideas are so freely shared, we should all try to contribute where we can.

It gives you a chance to work on valuable skills

I didn’t realise the presentation would be recorded but I’m glad it was. It seems that talking and sharing are important skills.

Keep them short

Bad short presentations can be forgiven
Bad long presentation are terrible
Good short presentation are great
Good long presentation can be boring

Learning

One slide per idea, don’t use a lot of text
Break up slides with examples, something visual and a minimum of 3 jokes
Large titles let you focus on speaking, rather than focusing on reading
Practice by recording yourself
Keep trying and improving

So, give a presentation and make some visualisations with d3.

Balance

2013-04-28T00:00:00.000Z

Near the end of a four year stint in a corporate environment I took four weeks holiday by the beach. I relaxed, played guitar, prayed, treated acne, ate well and exercised with running, push ups and sit ups. It was a great time of recovery and healing and I started feeling better about myself and more healthy in the process.

When I returned back to work one of my managers looked at me, surprised and laughing, saying “You look so healthy!.. I guess a holiday will do that”. And I was healthier. Up until that point my work and church had been my life, even church had become work where I served as a leader in youth group, worship team, and later the leadership team. Study and music were my only escape from my work, I enjoyed the creative and intellectual stimulation that they brought and they made me feel.. more balanced.

I joined Inspire9 in December, 2011 and my work life changed considerably.
I left my church of ten years and moved in with two high school mates and their partners near the city but far enough out of the smog for it to be enjoyable.
I was a beginner again.
I rested and played often by going to St Kilda beach or eating out with friends.
I bought a bicycle and began riding to work whenever the sun was out.

It took me a little while to actually enjoy exercise other than riding but I got there in the end. There’s a large group interested in fitness at inspire9 and they encouraged me to start running, now I love it. Recently I was inspired by the gymnastics of Cirque du Soleil and Ido Portal’s thoughts on movement. I’m riding and running regularly and practicing my handstands most days, the stretches and strength exercises make me feel healthier, happier and more balanced. I attended Yoga for the first time last week and instantly enjoyed it, even though I found it difficult.

Lastly but certainly not least there is a good woman in my life. Trish is honest, kind and beautiful, we laugh often and comfort each another. I like her a lot.

Right now, I feel I am living a more balanced and healthy life than I ever have:

A balance in my physical body and spirituality.
A balance in intellectual study and artistic expression.
A balance in my relationships and my work.

Vipassana

2012-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

Vipassana Meditation, The Art of Living
As taught by S.N.Goenka

A friendly nomadic German generously sent me a copy of this book in the mail, it’s a short 150 page book explaining the how’s and why’s of Vipassana meditation.

I have been wanting to learn more about meditation for a while now, ever since reading @xshay’s post I suppose. Ryan Singer’s OffscreenMag article and Steve Jobs biography also encouraged me to look more closely at it. These three gents are more intelligent, more skilled and more balanced than most.

My first surprise was finding that this form of Buddhist meditation wasn’t religious at all. It asserts that suffering is caused by not understanding our own reactions - the reaction to pleasant sensations is craving, our reaction to unpleasant sensations is aversion. The meditation itself focuses on breath and progresses to focusing on sensations in every part of the body, one at a time.

The aim of the meditation is to become aware of how our mind behaves, by trying to focus on one thing only(breath coming out of the nostrils) we become aware of all of the different sensations but we don’t react to them. As I understand it, the purpose of Vipassana is to simply observe ourselves to train our minds to focus, so that rather than reacting to our senses without understanding, we can simply recognize the sensation and choose how to respond.

It also includes some basic teaching on morality and encourages us to keep a pure mind:

to abstain from killing any living creature
to abstain from stealing
to abstain from sexual misconduct
to abstain from false speech
to abstain from intoxicants

One part of the teaching that really resonated with me was teaching that we have only ourselves to blame for our unhappiness and suffering because it originates in our mind. If we stop reacting to unpleasant sensations or wrongs that we feel have been made to us we can simply recognize them from a distance and move on. No need to carry them with us and continue our suffering.

I’m willing to give the practical aspects of Vipassana a shot and see what I can learn about myself in the process of meditation, one of the real attractions to me is it’s simplicity. I consider myself a happy person, but I would like to have greater control over how I react.

Death

2012-11-06T00:00:00.000Z

This is proving difficult to write as I have no clear thoughts on what I truly believe or think about death, it’s all a bit hazy. Perhaps by the time I’m done writing this rambling piece I won’t be pestered by it quite so often.

Without wanting to sound creepy, I think about death a lot.

For me, breaking the mould of routine has always triggered fresh thoughts on life and death. When I have moved on and not known where I’m headed I ask a lot of questions, these questions force me to make conscious decisions about my future.

Death motivates me to begin new things. This will sound exceptionally lame, but when Steve Jobs died I decided to quit my job of four years. It is an uncomfortable reminder that our lives are indeed a vapour, we are here for only a moment and then we leave.

Death presents someone’s life to me as a short, singular entity with a sure end. I replay memories, perhaps writing some of the dearer ones down. If you forget interactions with someone who has passed away, those moments are lost forever. Our lives are the cumulation of these sorts of simple interactions, we mustn’t forget them.

My favourite relative passed away last week. Winnie wasn’t a direct relative, she was my mother’s father’s brother’s spouse. I only remember meeting her a dozen times or so, but I loved her. I loved her joyfulness and the excited way she reached out to greet me when I said hello at Christmases and birthdays. Her beaming smile and laugh was infectious, she expected nothing from me, she seemed perfectly happy simply to exchange smiles and share each others company.

Time had done it’s work and taken most of her eyesight and mobility, so she held my hands and found her way around my fingers like a blind person would to recognise and acknowledge another. I will miss her.

Death makes me sit up and take notice, of life’s simple interactions and also the bigger questions like our life’s work, legacy and meaning.

Ecclesiastes is an exploration of the meaning of life, the final chapter concludes with an exploration of aging and ultimately death.

when the keepers of the house tremble,
    and the strong men stoop,
when the grinders cease because they are few,
    and those looking through the windows grow dim;
when the doors to the street are closed
    and the sound of grinding fades;
when people rise up at the sound of birds,
    but all their songs grow faint;
when people are afraid of heights
    and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
    and the grasshopper drags itself along
    and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home
    and mourners go about the streets.

Front end chops

2012-06-13T00:00:00.000Z

The role of the front-end web developer has become more important, more complicated yet simpler in many ways.

This post is a response to @rmurphey’s brilliant A Baseline for Front-End Developers article.

The role of the front-end developer has become more complicated with the tooling and experience we are expected to have under our belts, it’s also become easier in a lot of ways though.

More important

JavaScript has grown up, left home, and is out taking on the world. It is the most popular language on github and is continually taking processing off the server and moving it to the client, this trend will continue. HTML5 has promoted web tech to another level of interactivity and power. CSS3 has enabled designers to implement effect and animations that previously required a lot of complex scripting or flash. Mobile devices have come out with great web browsers like Mobile Safari, Opera, Chrome and Firefox. Frameworks like PhoneGap have enabled web apps to power installed apps on all the major platforms. The web as a platform is kicking ass - an enthusistic crowd of designers/developers are building it daily, contributing to each others work. The web is deployable everywhere, future proof, cheap to build, and more powerful than ever.

More complicated

If you read Rebecca’s article you might feel overwhelmed at the level of things you need to learn, so lets simplify it - HTML, CSS & JavaScript is what’s important. Know those and you can develop for the web.

Tools have complicated things though, there is now an ever present learning curve before us. If you join a new team or project you will probably be expected to learn a handful of unfamiliar tools that the team has adopted, you’d also do well to be able to offer a handful of your own practices/tools/frameworks that you like. Tooling is really highly valued at the moment.

I’m a keen learner but a late adopter, I don’t jump from one hot thing to the next. If you always adopt the hot new thing, you will often be adopting more code and complexity, the key is to find tools that require less code and complexity and allow you to do more.

The JavaScript scene at the moment is very much the wild west. It seems only yesterday that people actually cared what happened when javascript was disabled in the browser. There is no one right way to build front-end web applications, my advice is to keep it as simple as possible and write as little code as you can get away with.

Yet Simpler

Browsers are great now, IE is dying. Web standards have won and it’s now easier to develop for the web. CSS3 means that there’s a lot of power and visual reward for a small amount of effort / code. While there’s more to learn, a lot of libraries allow you to go further and do more.

The best tools save you time and allow you to write better, more elegant and maintainable code.

Back to work

2012-04-23T00:00:00.000Z

I signed my life away to @inspire9 today, I’m very happy to be working in such an amazing community and look forward to my work there.

Leaving full-time employment

Leaving my job was the best thing I have done for my career and personal development.
Being unemployed without a plan is a very freeing and revealing thing, you are forced to ask those important questions like “What do I want to be doing with my short time left on the planet?” and “What do I want my work to accomplish?”.

I haven’t yet answered either of those, but having some free time on my hands I was able for the first time in a long while choose what I wanted to work on. I set very simple, achievable goals for myself - I would linger around Inspire9, take on some freelance jobs to support myself and study. For a year I would see if I could sustain myself and work on my craft, I also wanted to work along side talented people I could learn from.

Client work

I love working directly with clients, being able to contribute to a design, offer advice across wide areas(staffing, ux, design, development, workflows, timelines, marketing etc.). I like the fact that small clients are small, they have more riding on their projects being successful and I like being able to contribute to that success.

I will continue to take on client work wherever I can.

Extremely fortunate

I feel extremely fortunate to be working on the web, in Melbourne. There is a huge amount of good work available, I thought this would be the case but I was still surprised at the amount. If you feel that you could be doing something more satisfying with your time, leave.

I only worked with four clients in my short time as a freelancer, two of those clients offered me ongoing work for the rest of the year that I’ve gladly accepted.

Touch swipe events

2012-03-30T00:00:00.000Z

I had to make an iOS like UI today and transition in different ‘pages’ by swiping. A few gotcha’s and how-to’s if you’re building something similar.

HTML - Laying out the grid

I first laid out a grid with a visible region the size of one of the pages.

<div id="grid-wrap">
  <div id="grid">
    <div id="pos-0-0"></div>
    <div id="pos-1-0"></div>
    <div id="pos-2-0"></div>
    <div id="pos-0-1"></div>
    <div id="pos-1-1"></div>
    <div id="pos-2-1"></div>
    <div id="pos-0-2"></div>
    <div id="pos-1-2"></div>
    <div id="pos-2-2"></div>
  </div>
</div>

CSS

All examples use SASS and Compass.

$height: 748px;
$width: 1024px;
$rows = 3;
$cols = 3;

#grid-wrap {
  height: $height;
  width: $width;
  overflow: hidden;
}
#grid {
  height: $height * $rows;
  width: $width * $cols;
  @include transition(all .3s ease-in-out);
}
#grid > div {
  position: absolute;
  height: $height;
  width: $width;
  -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}
@for $y from 0 through $rows-1 {
  @for $x from 0 through $cols-1 {
    .no-csstransforms {
      .pos-$x-$y {
        top: $y;
        left: $x;
      }
    }
    .csstransforms {
      .pos-$x-$y #grid {
        @include transform(translate($x*-$width, $y*-$height));
      }
    }
  }
}

I first just transitioned the top and left values and it worked everywhere but the performance on the iPad wasn’t the best. Webkit has heavily optimised transforms using translate so the result was much better using translate. You could use modernizr to get the best of both worlds and serve transforms to the browsers that understand it. #winning.

-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; is necessary so that the device renders the content off screen so that it doesn’t repaint when it’s scrolled in from one of the edges - without it the images flicker after a transition.

-webkit-backface-visibility did add a problem for me though, I was using a <video> element with video.js and I couldn’t click the play button within one of the elements with that property set. It took me a while to figure out but if you add a transform to the elements you need to interact with it somehow pulls them back into line.

.video {
  @include transform(translate(0, 0));
}

JavaScript

I modified the jQuery Touchwipe Plugin so that it normalised click and drag as well as touch events. I also added a afterSwipe callback to make it a little more useful for me.

$body = $('body');
var updatePos = function() {
  $body[0].className = 'pos-' + pos.x + '-' + pos.y;
}
$swiper = $body.swipe({
  swipeLeft: function() {
    if (pos.x < 2 && pos.y !== 0)
    pos.x = pos.x+1;
  },
  swipeRight: function() {
    if (pos.x > 0 && pos.y !== 0)
    pos.x = pos.x-1;
  },
  swipeUp: function() {
    if (pos.y < 2)
    pos.y = pos.y+1;
  },
  swipeDown: function() {
    if (pos.y > 0)
    pos.y = pos.y-1;
  },
  afterSwipe: updatePos,
  threshold: 20,
  preventDefaultEvents: true
});

It’s fun playing with some of the -webkit features and seeing how they’ve optimised different features they deemed worthy enough for it. The ease-in-out transitions with transforms feel just like the native experience - It’s worth going the extra steps to optimise for these devices.

SVG Motion Paths

2012-03-15T00:00:00.000Z

Building a simple HTML5 game this week I’ve learned heaps about motion graphics, Canvas and SVG. I’ve also learnt a few new tricks with Sass and CSS transitions for keeping my code clean.

Game On

The Super Game of Life was beautifully designed by a Melbourne design agency, it’s a simple turn based game with multiple choice answers.

You spin to move your car around the track, answering questions along the way, if you answer correctly you add sweet moolah to your Super, as you pass Go you collect 2 years. The game ends when you answer all 12 questions correctly or are 10 years wiser.

Animation basics

All animation libraries at their core are a loop that runs as many times as they can over a given time, throughout the loop they calculate the change in position by multiplying the total distance by a progress(between 0 and 1) by an easing function. Easing functions make an animation slow down or speed up throughout the animation.

Here’s a simple example showing how a position between 0 and 100 could be calculated.

var easing = {
  linear: function (n) {
    return n;
  },
  easeIn: function (n) {
    return Math.pow(n, 1.7);
  },
  easeOut: function (n) {
    return Math.pow(n, .48);
  }
}
var progress = [0,.1,.2,.3,.4,.5,.6,.7,.8,.9,1];
var distance = 100;

for (var i=0, ii = progress.length; i<ii; i++) {
  var position = distance * easing.linear(progress[i])
  console.log(position);
}

linear	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100
easeIn	2	6	13	21	31	42	55	68	84	100
easeOut	33	46	56	64	72	78	84	90	95	100

Read through the source of Animator.js if you want to learn more about it.

The Car

I’m a big fan of Raphael.js so at first I tried to use SVG exclusively for the car, animation and path tracking - and it was working, but testing on the first generation iPad the performance was just too slow to have the desired effect for the game. I ended up using SVG for the path & Canvas for the rendering.

Motion paths

SVG paths have the DOM methods getTotalLength() and getPointAtLength(length) which can be used to get specific points along a path. Those are all we need to move an element along an SVG path with some simple animation timers - I used jQuery’s animate function to do this so I didn’t have to re-invent them. You could pull parts of Animator.js out if you wanted to this yourself.

Rotation

Math.atan2(point2.x-point1.x, point2.y-point1.y) returns the angle between two points in radians.

When drawing an image on a rotated canvas you need to draw relative to the pivot point of the image - In the case of the car that’s the point at the base between the wheels. ctx.drawImage(image, 0-(width/2), 0-height, width, height);

Canvas’ transformation matrix

It took me a little while to understan Canvas’ translation matrix, the Mozilla Canvas docs helped.

If you’re going to be using rotation in your canvas animations you’ll need to use save() and restore() to save the current transformation matrix so that you can get back to different points in building the frames. I think of it as building a frame on the way up using translate, rotate & draw, then tearing it back down again on the way back.

clear - entire canvas
save - untransformed matrix at (0,0)
translate - point(x,y)
rotate - radians
draw - relative to pivot point
restore - restore untransformed matrix

The code

var game = {
  postion: 1,
  steps: 5,
  halfPi: Math.PI/2,
  initPaper: function() {
    var p = game.paper = Raphael('paper', 1022, 762);
    game.path = p.path('M196.5,117.5L906,118c0,0,27.038,5.5,27,29c-0.039,24.331,0,96,0,96s2,28-23,32s-283,2-283,2s-75.86,11.37-76,91c-0.142,81.018,71,88,71,88h52c0,0,31,6,31,40s1,92,1,92s-8,68-74,67s-264,0.011-264,0.011s-24-2.934-24-29.011c0-22.5,22.913-25.153,22.913-25.153L408,601c0,0,75-17,79-94s-82.742-93.03-82.742-93.03L173,414c0,0-76-6-78-78s0-113,0-113l7-28c0,0,0-39,26-62s60-21,60-21L196.5,117.5z').attr({ 'stroke-width': 0 });
    game.pathPoints = [.96, .01, .1, .176, .247, .31, .42, .5, .570, .645, .71, .81, .882, .999];
    game.pathLength = game.path.getTotalLength();
    game.canvas = document.getElementById('canvas');
    game.ctx = dgame.canvas.getContext("2d");

    var img = new Image();
    img.src = 'img/car-work-horse-small.png';
    game.carImage = img;
    game.animateCar(.95, 1, 1000);
  }
  stepCar: function() {
    if (game.steps == 0) return;
    game.steps--;
    var start = game.position;
    game.position++;
    game.animateCar(game.pathPoints[start], game.pathPoints[game.position], 1000, game.stepCar);
  },
  paintCar: function(point) {
    game.x = point.x;
    game.y = point.y;

    var ctx = game.ctx;
    ctx.clearRect(0, 0, game.canvas.width, game.canvas.height);
    ctx.save();
    ctx.translate(game.x, game.y);
    ctx.rotate(game.rotation);
    ctx.drawImage(game.carImage, 0-(game.carWidth/2), 0-game.carHeight, game.carWidth, game.carHeight);
    ctx.restore();
  },
  animateCar: function(start, end, time, complete) {
    var distance = (end-start)*game.pathLength;
    start = start * game.pathLength;
    var ctx = game.ctx;
    var dy, dx, rotation;
    $canvas.animate({ "progress": 1 }, {
      easing: "linear",
      duration: time,
      step: function(a, obj) {
        var point = game.path.getPointAtLength(start + (obj.state * distance));
        dx = point.x-game.x;
        dy = point.y-game.y;
        var rotation = 0-(Math.atan2(dx,dy) - game.halfPi);
        if (dx == 0 && dy == 0) return; /* same point */
        game.rotation = rotation;
        game.paintCar(point);
      },
      complete: complete || function() {}
    });
  }
}

The Spinner

I started out making the spinner rotate with CSS transitions when a click & drag was detected. That was pretty simple to achieve with CSS transitions for a smooth animation with easing. Sass also helped keep the code nice and simple with math, variables & loops.

#wheel {
  background: url(../img/spinner.png);
  height: 230px;
  width: 230px;
  position: absolute;
  @include transition(all 1.5s ease-out);
  @for $i from 1 through 6 {
    $rotation = 360deg*3 + $i*60;
    &.spin-#{$i} {
      @include transform(rotate($rotation));
    }
    &.reverse.spin-#{$i} {
      @include transform(rotate(0-$rotation));
    }
  }
}

var touching = false;
var down = function(event) {
  touching = true;
  return false;
}
var move = function(event) {
  if (touching && !game.spinning) {
    spin();
    touching = false;
  }
}
var up = function(event) {
  touching = false;
}
if (window.Touch) {
  $spinner.bind('touchstart',down);
  $spinner.bind('touchmove',move);
  $spinner.bind('touchend',up);
}
else {
  $spinner.mousedown(down);
  $spinner.mousemove(move);
  $spinner.mouseup(up);
}

function spin() {
  game.spinning = true;
  var number = Math.floor(Math.random()*6)+1;
  $wheel.addClass('spin-'+number);
  game.steps = 6-number || 6;

  setTimeout(function() {
    $wheel.removeClass();
    game.spinning = false;
  }, 3000);
}

Going both ways

Making the spinner go in the reverse was a little more challenging. I needed to capture two points and then figure out which direction it was moving relative to the center of the spinner.

I ended up finding a pretty easy solution by dividing the spinner into into 4 quadrants and simply checking it was moving in one direction. Not perfect, but it works for real world cases.

e.g. If you touched in q1 it’s spinning in reverse if you move down.

var offset = $wheel.offset();
var pos = null,
quadrant = null,
center = { x: offset.left+115, y: offset.top+115 };

function getPos(event) {
  return {
    x: event.pageX,
    y: event.pageY
  }
}
function getQuadrant() {
  if (pos.x <= center.x && pos.y <= center.y)
    return 1;
  if (pos.x >= center.x && pos.y <= center.y)
    return 2;
  if (pos.x >= center.x && pos.y >= center.y)
    return 3;
  if (pos.x <= center.x && pos.y >= center.y)
    return 4;
  return null;
}
var down = function(event) {
  event = (window.Touch) ? event.originalEvent.touches[0] : event.originalEvent;
  pos = getPos(event);
  q = getQuadrant();
}
var move = function(event) {
  event = (window.Touch) ? event.originalEvent.touches[0] : event.originalEvent;
  var pos2 = getPos(event);
  if ((q == 1 && pos2.y > pos.y)
   || (q == 2 && pos2.x < pos.x)
   || (q == 3 && pos2.y < pos.y)
   || (q == 4 && pos2.x > pos.x)) {
    game.spinReverse = true;
  }
  else {
    game.spinReverse = false;
  }
}
var up = function(event) {
  pos = null;
}

Modals and ornaments

The dialogs are positioned off screen and transitioned in just by adding a class ‘active’. There’s really no need for complex javascript frameworks to achieve these sorts of effects anymore - with CSS3’s transitions it makes it easy.

I’ve started using generated content for ornamental elements that aren’t absolutely necessary for an element to function like the ribbons top & bottom of the dialogs.

<div id="overlay" class="active"></div>
<div id="choose" class="card active"></div>

#overlay {
  background: rgba(0,0,0,.4);
  position: fixed;
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
  opacity: 0;
  @include transition(opacity .3s linear);
  &.active {
    opacity: 1;
  }
}
.card {
  position: absolute;
  top: -800px;
  opacity: 0;
  background: #fff url(../img/texture.jpg);
  @include transition(all .5s ease-in);
  &.active {
    top: 115px;
    opacity: 1;
  }
  &:before {
    content: '';
    height: 11px;
    position: absolute;
    top: -11px;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    background: url(../img/ribbon-top.png);
  }
  &:after {
    content: '';
    height: 11px;
    position: absolute;
    bottom: -11px;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    background: url(../img/ribbon-bottom.png);
  }
}

These newer CSS properties make the code a lot leaner and easier to change, the way it should be.

And that’s it! I hope some of the code is useful in your own projects.

Node, a simple server

2012-03-02T00:00:00.000Z

Firing up a simple web server is super handy, I’ve started using node so that I can fire up a server from any directory and view the pages from multiple devices and VM’s.

Most of the things I am working on at the moment are simple front-end prototypes. Browsing local files via file:///Users/markbrown4/projects/ in different browsers is problematic, you can’t make ajax requests, some browsers treat local files differently.

Enter Node

Node takes a .js file and fires up a web server.
It has a heap of uses, in this case we only need it to do a little - serve html, css & js.

Install

cd ~/projects/
git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node
git checkout v0.6.7
./configure
make
sudo make install

Write a simple web server that serves html, css & js called.. “front-end-ftw.js” and put it in the directory of your site / app.

var http = require('http');
var fs = require('fs');
var path = require('path');

http.createServer(function (request, response) {

  console.log('request starting...');

  var filePath = '.' + request.url;
  if (filePath == './')
      filePath = './index.htm';

  var extname = path.extname(filePath);
  var contentType = 'text/html';
  switch (extname) {
    case '.js':
      contentType = 'text/javascript';
      break;
    case '.css':
      contentType = 'text/css';
      break;
  }

  path.exists(filePath, function(exists) {
    if (exists) {
      fs.readFile(filePath, function(error, content) {
        if (error) {
          response.writeHead(500);
          response.end();
        }
        else {
          response.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': contentType });
          response.end(content, 'utf-8');
        }
      });
    }
    else {
      response.writeHead(404);
      response.end();
    }
  });
}).listen(8125);

console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8125/');

http://thecodinghumanist.com/blog/archives/2011/5/6/serving-static-files-from-node-js

Run it

cd ~/projects/my-kick-ass-project/
node front-end-ftw

Anywhere

Load http://127.0.0.1:8125/ on an iDevice or test it in your windows vm.

Content types

From there you can add any extra content types you want to serve differently, if you want to be able to load images directly in the browser you can add the extensions. Making an offline web app? Add a cache manifest MIME type.

case '.jpg':
  contentType = 'image';
  break;
case '.png':
  contentType = 'image';
  break;
case '.json':
  contentType = "application/json";
  break;
case '.manifest':
  contentType = 'text/cache-manifest';
  break;

Vendor prefixes

2012-02-12T00:00:00.000Z

There are two things that should happen.
Developers should stop coding vendor prefixes by hand & vendors shouldn’t add any more prefixes into production releases.

I agree with Remy Sharp that other vendors including -webkit vendor prefix support is bat shit crazy.

Developers should stop coding vendor prefixes by hand

During development you can use prefix-free and for production pre-compile your css. Compass’ CSS3 module makes short work of this. Just include the feature and use it.

@import "compass/css3";

div {
  @include border-radius(10px);
}

This centralisation of vendor-prefixing is what is needed. As support is added in browsers Compass can be updated to include new prefixes all without you having to change source code plugging in all the holes.

Vendors shouldn’t add any more prefixes into production releases. “Non-production ready browsers should support experimental prefixes, production ready releases should not.” - @rem

The prefixes should be kept to nightly / beta builds for testing purposes only. That was the intention for them anyway, those really interested in testing the features and giving feedback will and we won’t have this problem going forward. This means the CSS working group will need to standardize these properties fast so they can hit the stable releases.

Compass is bad ass

2012-01-26T00:00:00.000Z

will certainly be using Compass in the future for building sites, whether they are static or dynamic. Pre-compilers and static site generators are all the rage right now, Haml, Sass & CoffeeScript have changed things for the better, there’s no reason to be scared of them.

Install

Install the compass gem
Create a site
Watch for changes

This will sit in the background and compile your CSS whenever you make changes to any of the files. Awesome.

gem install compass
compass create test-app
compass watch test-app

Sprites

@import "icon/*.png";
@include all-icon-sprites;

And, you’re done.

That’s right. Those two lines will generate the sprite image and styles automagically for you.

I also like to include a sprite class which makes an element behave line a normal image.

.sprite {
  display: inline-block;
  vertical-align: middle;
  height: 16px;
  width: 16px;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-indent: -9999px;
}

<b class="sprite icon-tick">Save</b>

There’s another include for spriting regular, hover & active states as well.

@import "selectors/*.png";
@include all-selectors-sprites;

selectors/comment.png
selectors/comment_hover.png
selectors/comment_active.png

Compass features

I’ve only played with the css3 & reset utilities so far, a reset stylesheet is included by default. There are many more utilities though which I’ll be playing with.

One of the best features in my opinion of the whole compass piece is the color utilities like lighten(color, amount) & darken(color, amount). When you’re tweaking a design you’re often just tweaking contrasts, this is where these two utilities shine.

@import "compass/reset";
@import "compass/css3";
$link-color: #0084B4;

a {
  color: $link-color;
}
a:hover {
  color: darken($link-color, 15%);
}

Using variables for things makes a lot of sense.

You could define gutter widths for a design and then set widths & margins in your layout using simple maths meaning you can change the spacing globally.

css3 mixins

There’s a background function which will generate vendor prefixes and supports multiple background images. You can even mix colors into rbga() if you don’t know the specific RGB values, a color is a color.

#header {
  @include background(
    linear-gradient(top, rgba(black,0) 50%, rgba(black,.3)),
    image-url("textures/tartan.png")
  );
}
#wrapper {
  @include border-radius(10px);
}

Deploy!

When you’re ready to deploy combine and minify your assets

compass compile -e production --force

Easy as pie.

First week

2012-01-06T00:00:00.000Z

My first week on the outside was thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying. Working for yourself somehow seems more honest, you know precisely what you have done and accomplished and are completely accountable for what you produce.

Inspire9

The LOLivator works pretty hard and requires a rest often. If you push this hard worker over the edge on a Friday the lights will go out. The door isn’t too heavy though so can claw your way out.

It’s got a bit of charm, don’t you think?

I’m still finding my way around the new office but it’s filled with friendly, intelligent people making interesting things for the web. It looks and feels like a great place to build things with a good mix of skills and expertise.

I did manage to find one PC in the office. I can only assume it’s there for testing things in Internet Explorer, what else would it be used for?

Sights & sounds

The local coffee is quite good.
It’s just 10 minutes from home, I might even borrow one of my house mates twelve bikes and ride in.
Good taste in music, though I can’t help visualizing The Lonely Boy whenever I hear the iconic Black Keys song.
A MakerBot was delivered to the office.

Business

I’m not flippant with work if I’ve made a commitment to it, but business is all secondary to that other stuff for me at the moment. Right now, I’m optimizing my life for happiness, health & study.

I did manage to pick up two small jobs this week after recommendations from earlier work - which I am very thankful for.

Coda

I’ve got a few leads to follow up on, and it looks like some work done this week will lead to some more. I realise it’s very early days still, but, going out and walking my own path hasn’t been all that scary and I have zero regrets so far.

Carpe Diem baby.

Dabblet previewers

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

I was really impressed when I saw Dabblet by @leaverou. It’s simple & fast for editing front-end code and sharing it via gists. The thing that impressed me most was the previewers, the animated pie timer & the measuring rulers in particular. These helpful little bubbles that pop up when you mouse over a keyword in CSS which give a visual representation of the values.

I poked around until I figured out how Lea created them and I wanted to share because that’s what we web developers do.

The bubble itself is made up of 1 element plus two extra pseudo elements for the tick & an overlay with the border and inset shadow.

<div id="color" class="previewer"></div>

/* Cute little value previewers */
.previewer {
  position: absolute;
  border-radius: 8px;
  box-shadow: 1px 1px 8px rgba(0,0,0,.7);
}
/* tick */
.previewer:before {
  content: '';
  position: absolute;
  bottom: -6px; /* move half the width left to center */
  left: 50%; /* left edge at center */
  width: 12px;
  height: 12px;
  border: inherit;
  margin-left: -6px; /* drag left 6px (half the width) to center */
  background: white;
  transform: rotate(45deg); /* make a square a triangle */
  box-shadow: inherit;
}
/* content canvas of the previewer */
.previewer:after {
  content: '';
  position: absolute;
  /* make edges touch parent elements, match dimensions */
  top: 0; right: 0; bottom: 0; left: 0;
  border: 5px solid white;
  border-radius: inherit;
  box-shadow: 1px 1px 5px rgba(0,0,0,.5) inset;
}

I’m only going to break down two of the previewers that were particularly interesting to me.

#abslength

This little ruler is created with a devilish combination of gradients, Lea explained how to create CSS3 patterns recently in her 24ways article which explains it all better than I can.

There’s two main repeating gradients used to create the effect, one 20px wide, the other 5px which overlap and give the effect of the measuring stick. The background-size property sets the height of the ticks in the ruler.

<div id="abslength" class="previewer"></div>

#abslength {
  max-width: 100%;
  height: 20px;
  border: 1px solid white;
  border-radius: 0;
  transition: .3s;
  transition-property: width;
}
#abslength:before {
  bottom: -7px;
  background:
    url(noise.png),
    linear-gradient(-45deg,
      hsla(200, 10%, 20%, 0) 47%,
      hsl(200, 10%, 20%) 48%);
}
#abslength:after {
  border: 0;
  background:
    repeating-linear-gradient(left,
      transparent,
      transparent 19px,
      rgba(255,255,255,.6) 19px,
      rgba(255,255,255,.6) 20px)
      left top no-repeat,
    repeating-linear-gradient(left,
      transparent,
      transparent 4px,
      rgba(255,255,255,.4) 4px,
      rgba(255,255,255,.4) 5px)
      left top no-repeat,
    url(noise.png),
    linear-gradient(
      hsla(200, 10%, 20%, .8),
      hsl(200, 10%, 20%));
  background-size: 100% 10px, 100% 5px, auto, auto;
  box-shadow: none;
}

#time

This little guy took the cake for me. The same old previewer is used but the border-radius is bumped right up to make a circle, the animated timer itself is pure SVG with animated values. I love seeing a mix of SVG & CSS to create something simple, easily readable and flexible.

The pie shapes can be created with a combination of the stroke-dasharray & stroke-dashoffset properties on the element. After a bit of trial and error I was able to find a combination that produced the desired effect.

<div id="time" class="previewer">
  <svg>
    <circle r="15.9" cy="32" cx="32" stroke-dasharray="100" transform="rotate(-90) translate(-64 0)">
      <animate repeatCount="indefinite" dur="2s" values="-100;-300" attributeName="stroke-dashoffset">
    </circle>
  </svg>
</div>

#time {
  width: 74px;
  height: 74px;
  margin-left: -37px;
  background: linear-gradient(right,
    hsla(24, 20%, 95%, .4),
    hsl(24, 20%, 95%) 95%);
  /* half the width/height for a perfect circle */
  border-radius: 37px;
}
#time:before {
  bottom: -4px;
}
#time:after {
  background: url(noise.png);
  z-index: 2;
}
.previewer > svg {
  display: block;
  z-index: 1;
  position: relative;
}
#time > svg {
  margin: 5px;
  width: 64px;
  height: 64px;
  border-radius: 32px;
  background: inherit;
  transform: rotate(-90deg);
}
#time circle {
  stroke: hsl(200, 10%, 20%);
  stroke-opacity: .9;
  fill: transparent;
  /* just shy of width to prevent clipping */
  stroke-width: 31.8;
}

I’ve always been a big fan of Raphael.js for creating SVG / VML making it work all the way down to IE6. Seeing how SVG has been adopted in IE9 now and this is being heavily pushed it makes sense to figure out how to write SVG directly without a js abstraction.

SVG is certainly a useful tool in the box when needed. JavaScript only plays the role of the puppeteer for these previewers in Dabblet, tweaking the values and making it come to life. In this production, the mix of CSS3 properties (gradients, shadows, generated content, transitions) & SVG are the real stars.

Other things I’ve borrowed

Apart from learning some cool new uses of CSS gradients and more about SVG I’ve also copied and hacked code-highlight.js & prefix-free.js for use on this site. This is why I love open source.

That’s all for now

I hope you found something in there that you can use in your own projects, I know I did.

Thanks Lea!

A fresh start

2011-12-11T00:00:00.000Z

Last year was a big year. I worked really really hard, put my heart and soul into my work, only to start all over again at the end of the year.

2011

Left my church of 10 years
Left my job of 4 years
Moved house & location
Traveled alone through South East Asia & China
Did a lot more design work
Learnt Ruby on Rails
Built a really cool web application
Became really opinionated

Leaving the corporate machine

To put it simply, I ended up feeling a bit like Peter Gibbons in Office Space.

People at work were bitter, lazy & unfocused, they lacked leadership.

It was a long time coming, I was tired of working on large corporate projects for large corporate clients. I wanted to try working in a more creative environment along side people more focused on good design principles. I feel it will be a more enjoyable work experience and more rewarding also.

And so, I’m branching out into the world of freelance, getting fit & meeting new people. Happy days.