Blog

The mobile monolith that is Mobile World Congress is over for another year. I was lucky enough to get hold of a press pass and decided to spend the week in Barcelona. Soaking up the warmer weather, joining the 90,000 other attendees and preparing for the bombardment of marketing mumbo jumbo to unearth some gems for developers.

I picked this book up as part of a book bundle somewhere, but escapes me with one right now. It's timing was perfect as research for the development of Chip Shop as it covers the history of video games from 1970 up to the year 2000.

This week has been a fervent flurry of activity as I prepare for <a href="/its-all-change-again" target="_blank">starting my new job next week</a>.

The financial sector is an industry ripe for technical disruption. It is well-financed, has many multifaceted requirements and the vast majority of us need its services on a regular basis. The last couple of years have created a plethora of startups and product offerings to service the financial sector and the financial needs of consumers. It even has its own buzzword, 'FinTech', to really prove it has arrived.

My plan for 2015 was to spend another few months working on my various projects and then start looking for new full-time work opportunities. In the past month I made a few casual enquires to get an idea of what might be out there and ended up getting quite a few offers very quickly. Many of these I considered but weren&#39;t compelling or different enough (from past work roles) to be worth putting a hold on my own projects.

Quite a lot of small updates, tweaks and additions to the various Gregarious Mammal sites, here they are.

After some polishing, planning and technical tweaking the text version of my work of fiction is now online.

As part of my research in projects odtwe I have been reading some classics of utopian and dystopian fiction. Most recently I completed Jack London's The Iron Heel.

Yesterday I came up with the most phenomenal idea of how to get my writing workflow, ideas for ODTWE and tech stack in ‘perfect’ combination. Well, in theory (unsurprisingly).

Continuing my reviews of research I have just finished the classic "Kobold Guide to Board Game Design<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=gregamamma-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1936781042" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" width="1" />" and can highly recommend it as a good overview of board game design advice. It is a collection of essays more than an end-to-end guide, so some essays will hold more relevance with you than others. However I picked up enough nuggets of advice to make it a worthwhile purchase and have a long list of 'todos. it includes essays from some stalwarts of the industry such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield" target="_blank">Richard Garfield</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_(US_game_designer)" target="_blank">Steve Jackson</a> (who created large parts of my childhood) and is divided into sections of the design process. One of the encouraging outcomes of reading the book was realising that I am currently on track and already doing a lot of what was recommended, but also realised I have a long way to go yet!

Last week I spent time on creating some of the common elements that can be found across all of the Gregarious Mammal sites, this includes:<ul><li>Creative Commons notice</li><li>Mailing List</li><li>Financially contributing to projects</li><li>Git and version information</li></ul>

Somehow I forgot to post this here...

I have completed the iOS version of Answers Against Humanity, it is currently in the App Store submission process, but I am thinking it might be rejected due to the content.

I am currently open to opportunities for full-time and part-time work. Ideally with an enterprising startup or with a larger agency or internal development team.

I added a set of new categories and related resources to the Lean Traveller site yesterday including Communication, travel and some resources under archiving.

After visiting the Tate Modern over Christmas and seeing these two images (I've forgotten the artist):

I spent Christmas undertaking some more general board game theory and computer history research, this has been helped by a slew of book bundles over the last month covering the topic.

I have started building the site for the "One Day the World Ended" project in Ruby on Rails and thus needed some designs. Here are my rough ones so far.

I guess most of its stylistic inspiration comes from Kurt Vonnegut and to a lesser extent surreal dark British comedy such as Douglas Adams. It is about the end of the world, but that isn't the point, it's just a vehicle. The fact that the world is ending isn't relevant, it's merely a surreal vehicle to explore elements of the human condition. Wow, that last sentence sounded pretentious!

I have just finished getting in place the basic structures behind the sites for my new projects and redeveloping my older sites accordingly.

This update is more behind the scenes updates I'm afraid, I have been working on the product release and event cards, making very good progress. However I am currently using real names in the cards and I have no clearance for any of them, that will be a big task in the new year, but for now it's easier to just keep them private. Sorry, but the research has been a lot of fun, follow the twitter feed to see a few highlights.

2014 was quite a year, especially for technology and how it affects everyone. Here are some of my highlights, lowlights and observations on the year and how it maybe affected developers.

I love Drupal and end up undertaking most of my programming projects with it. I have been using it for so long that I find it far easier to push out projects with Drupal than with anything else, despite it's infamous learning curve.

Chip Shop has had quite a busy week and I have a few updates to tell you about.

I've had Lollipop (Android 5) on my phone for about ten days now, so it seemed like a good time to report back on my feelings and experiences with this new, 'material design' laden Operating System.

Just a small update, with a much larger one coming next week.

Along side getting the Chip Shop website online (needing a lot more work of course!) I have started defining the core game concepts, i.e. what you are aiming to do in the the game and what components will help you achieve this. I have also spent some time trawling through 80s US computer history pulling out products, personalities and events that will form the game cards.

I have just rolled it the first incarnation of <a href="https://theleantraveller.com/" target="_blank">The Lean Traveller</a>, with the first of the topics we will be covering, '<a href="https://theleantraveller.com/money" target="_blank">Money</a>'.

Are you looking for smart answers to dumb questions? Then you might enjoy 'Answers Against Humanity', based on that 'award' winning game, Cards Against Humanity.

Now I live in a non-english speaking country, not only am I far more understanding of non-english speakers in English speaking countries, but I am also more conscious of providing content in multiple languages. The first point is something I would like to revisit in a future post, but for now lets look at a new option for providing content in different languages.