aboynejames

At the start of 2008 I started a big self education exercise, going from a semi-tech enthusiast to a full time software engineer.  I regard being able to self educate as my no. 1 skill and it has served me well again.  mepath.com  is the main product of my coding but I have also launched a local farmers market site for Aberdeenshire region in Scotland, while my aboynejames.co.uk   website provides the testing ground for all.

Initially I started to learn both PHP and Ruby on Rails scripting languages.  PHP  won out due to the quality and range of help information and documentation on the web.  But along the path of learning my HTML has improved, CSS advanced a lot, XML crafting become sound, Javascript learnt and a grounding in AJAX gained.  I still find it a bit amusing that before you can get going you need to setup the coding environment, locally and on the web.  This seems like a mountain of a task, especially when VISTA issues are not bedded in but none the less the environment is established.  LAMP, Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP online and  Windows offline.   I can add SQL and databases to the list of learning too.

Open Source as an idea has always chimed a chord with me.   I come from the school of free flowing information so I understood the concept more from the user perspective but now I understand it from developers shoes too.  Open source provides the martical for learning, the coding environment, server to scripting and I can add open source applications including, fusion charts, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, Monkey Chow-Simple Pie RSS reader and other snippits along the way.  I am working on put together the opensource environment for the mepath code, again here I am looking to opensource communities of subversion or gnip to achieve that goal.

I started tagging my emails to friends,  aboynejames now 99.98% geek.  Coding day in day out definitely changes you.  For 3 years I’ve been experimenting with a few friends to get a machine to ‘read’ ie. understand the context of information.  Us humans take it for granted, we learn and then apply it to live of lives.  The goal is to create that holy grail of a naturally easy to use user interface for a website and beneath that goal lies a whole universe of complexity.  Standing back from it now, the ideas are straight forward enough in themselves, however linking them together and dealing with the high friction environment of data portability has resulted in me spending weeks, shut out from the world or more accurately engaging with the word but carrying some big problems 100% of the time.  So,  no doubt I have been distant from all at times.  It’s also been a fairly solo focused coding effort in the last 6 months with snippets of time with friends to gather input.  This phase is now coming to an end, as the idea has been expressed enough for those that wish to contribute to join in, users to coders.

And that means more participation in opensource projects, Activity streams, semanitc web php tools to communities.  That means I should get on with setting the environment for making that possible and happen.

James

These are the main ‘trend’ groups I belong to, support and actively participate in.  I think its quite a unique collection of groups.  To some they may seem diverse but to me they are perfectly aligned movements that will combine to be at the heart of society in the 21 century.

Looking or searching for a product can take a long time, especially if you have an image or ideas in your head to match too.  It can be as simple as wanting a specific color.  You google search, ebay, amazon.com the choices, back to google to find jewellery websites or specialist watch retailers or the manufacturers site.  It a matching in efficiency. Times ticks on.

Personalizing a product takes time but we will soon get to a stage where the time is less than time to do all the above activities.  There is an extra bonus too, the cost will be lower.  All the choice equals an inventory (stock) levels to be high.  Aggregate across a whole industry and the totals are massive and those are paid for in the price of each product.  Time in personalization will pass in expressing the ideas in your head and gaining the full picture of the product but those will be automatically brought to the user as they control the making of their product, a personalized product.

Been churning out the lines of code like there is no time for tomorrow for 7 months now.  Like all good decision in life, learning to write software has been rewarding.  It’s real enjoyable.  I have never had such ability to take an idea (and ideas start as dreams) and make them real, real life.