Last Friday was my last day at Betfair! After almost 2 years, I’ve decided a change was needed. I learnt a lot while being at Betfair, both technically and in team working skills. Some might argue that I’m opinionated and grumpy, but I’m just passionate about my job and I certainly grew a lot as an independent developer with my own ideas.

I’m starting straight away after this bank holiday week-end! No time to cool off or become a couch potato, I’m really excited to go to Lovefilm/Amazon next week, and it should be a great place to be!

I’ll have to update my commuting plans, the distance now being roughly 14 miles by bike, but I should be able to do that a couple of times a week without impacting too much my energy levels to be able to still have good week-end focused sessions. The train will have to become my friend a few times a week too, but I also have in mind to restore my mum’s 1974 motorised bike in the future. That should make for a nice little mechanics project, and a new way to get around!

Parcel Farce

Today I received a strange phone call. Someone whom I forgot the name from claimed to be from parcelforce, and told me there was a parcel waiting to be delivered to me, but for security reasons, in case I wasn’t able to receive it myself, he needed me to give me “two security names”…

Now, I’m aware those sort of phone calls are simply dumb stupid recruiters trying to obtain names of people inside the company, and I could well have hung up straight away, but I was keen to dig a bit more!

This post could also be entitled/summarised with “rant, rant, rant”, but for my own sake, I’ll make the effort of explaining what’s behind it.

My full time job title is “Front-end developer”. To anyone outside the web industry, it either means “err…. no idea”, or “a dude that makes websites”. To the initiated and (most) of my coworkers and industry pals, it means a whole lot more: I’m an expert in HTML, CSS, javascript (front-end technologies)… read more

Courtesy of Ivan de Marino, while taking a break from the total lack of aircon at work today.

On the terrace at Betfair