The Hypertext Markup Sandwich Blog

The next step

2006-03-02T22:46:00.000+01:00

I graduated from college in November. Now I'm a Bachelor of "ICT". Now I can officially engineer user interfaces in a team while keeping all phases of the project in view. Now I can claim to have actually been taught something without having to rely on insight as my only reasoning.

Meanwhile, I'm moving on in life. The company I spent 6 months interning at hired me during and after my graduation, and although my thesis project (the web portal) never took off, I helped them design their dream piece of content management software. But that story's come to a close as well, and I officially signed off with them last week.

When you graduate, your life really does get handed to you on a plate. I can go and do whatever I want now. I don't even have to stay in web development. At the moment, I'm looking overseas towards something "more". All that I know about it is that it has to be "more" -- more aligned to my interests, more fulfilling, more modern. More of what I want from life.

So, in a similar vein to the previous post nearly a year ago, I'll update this blog again once I've figured out what the next step is. I'm not really sure right now. But I'll find out soon enough.

I didn't even know there was an "Ajax" hype

2005-05-05T18:55:00.000+02:00

A new piece is up in my portfolio: the Bouwsteen Informatie Systeem. It's a web-based application that myself and a coursemate developed for our final college project. The client was a special primary school in a town nearby that requested a customised solution that improved upon their use of Excel and Word to manage student information.

I learned a lot from the process of developing it, but the most interesting part of it all, looking back, is that the XmlHttpRequest object I taught myself to use as a solution for seamless loading/fetching of data from the server appears to have become something of a hype while I was "away" working on it. Adaptive Path is claiming "Ajax" (Asynchronous Javascript + XML) will fundamentally change the way websites operate in the near future, basing this mainly on Google and other portals' use of it in their recent services (such as Google Maps and GMail). I'm left to wonder if it's worth hyping up at all - those who were interested in applying it to their software surely already have been doing so without coining 4-letter terms to make it popular.

Either way, my latest portfolio addition is up for all to see, although obviously a threesome of screenshots hardly accurately display the complex underlying engine that I crafted specifically for the project.

My aim in the next few months is to continue developing my php engine by integrating this new-fangled "Ajax" system that I created for this project. Perhaps then I can start worrying less about how to provide information to a user seamlessly, and more about improving the user experience overall.

Oh, and I started my internship at Yes2Web. I'll be working on developing generic community/portal software for them, so that's what will most likely be the next addition to my portfolio. Expect that in September or so. Until then!

The relaunch of Gamingredients

2005-01-03T19:48:00.000+01:00

The biggest project I've been working on for the past six months is relaunching my videogame webzine Gamingredients, which we finally got around to doing on the last possible date: New Year's Eve. I had promised the community a December relaunch, and I'd damn well achieve it too, even if it meant working over Christmas and essentially coming across as antisocial during the end of the year's activities.

Meanwhile, a lot of challenges we faced had to be put down like rabid dogs or pushed aside to tackle later on. Several of our most innovative features didn't make the cut, nor did the initial requirement of integrating the user community with the website. But in practice, all that doesn't matter: we achieved what we planned to, which was launch the site. Minimal features or not, the site is up and it's a motivator for my staff and my community, which was a responsibility I didn't intend to overlook.

It may seem overexaggerated to be spending so much time on something as fragile as a videogame journalism website (and certainly something as nerdy), but there are many things to consider. Most notable is probably the fact that the entire relaunch project essentially counts towards obtaining my college degree, and as such isn't wholly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Somehow managing to combine my personal hobbies with the requirements for this course was one of the greatest achievements of 2004. I also learned a great deal about managing staff through transitional phases, implementing user-friendly workflow management systems, and combining open source programming with my own. And alongside all that, I completed the Europrix project as an official part of my college curriculum, received half the experience points I need to be able to graduate, and managed to compile this website.

So all in all, 2004 was a success in the field of producing real work and real results, both in college and in the realm of responsibility I've built for myself since I initially created Gamingredients in 2002.

Now to at least double these achievements in 2005. I hope I can. I'm sure I can.

The year of the rooster

2005-01-03T19:41:00.000+01:00

Welcome to 2005, and coincidentally, my new weblog, the Hypertext Markup Sandwich. As required during the last two years of my university course (of which I am now in the final semester), I'll be updating whomever reads this on the status of my current projects, experiences, and insights relating to my work and my hobbies, web development and the games industry.