Flash on the Beach 2011: pre-conference

So every year I like to double my excitement for Flash on the Beach by preparing my lecture schedule in advance. It’s also really useful to use as reference at the conference itself – to remind me which of the three tracks I preferred when I actually had the time to sit down and read the overviews, and also if you need to find me you’ll know where I’m most likely to be.

So here’s my preferred schedule so far – there’s still a couple of unknowns but it’s looking pretty well rounded already…

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A Quick Announcement

You’ve probably noticed over the last year that I’ve not been posting much on TBOH. This was simply down to not having the time to play, experiment and share. The recession hit a few of my clients hard and this of course had quite a knock-on effect on me. I was finding that I was constantly having to chase down non-paying or late-paying clients, which was becoming a full-time job in itself. Cutting a long story short, I woke up one morning and realised that I hadn’t designed or developed anything for over six months purely due to excessive admin – and I decided there and then that this couldn’t go on.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Ferris Bueller

So 2 months ago I accepted a full-time position with a fantastic digital agency called ThinkJam, and began the process of slowly dissolving my company. On October 1st Plagro officially closed its offices to new business.

Although I will continue to maintain the websites of existing Plagro clients on a freelance basis, I now intend to take a break from the stresses of running a business and concentrate purely on development for a while. ThinkJam are a fantastic company with some extremely impressive clients. Even after only 2 months I feel very comfortable working for them and have already noticed a massive improvement in both my development skills and my own general well-being. They’re a great agency and I think I’m going to be very happy with them.

So what does this mean for TBOH?

Well, it means that I now have a lot more time for personal projects. I’m currently spending my spare time working with a few APIs that I’ve been meaning to play with for some time now and I’ll post any findings as I go along. I will also be revisiting the Tweeter class very soon – I’ve been working on a series of classes that I’m currently calling TweetEvent that will allow for greater searchability of Twitter (hashtags and users included)…and I will post it up as soon as it’s vaguely usable.

As I’m developing on a full-time basis again you’re also likely to notice an increase in short posts – I would like to keep up the momentum of simple problem solving posts both for my own reference and as a way of helping others who encounter the same time-wasting issues.

So…onwards and upwards…