For all the details please check out the BackChat.io’s blog post over at http://blog.backchat.io/post/8350551928/developer-wanted

I’ve had what some may consider to be an unusual upbringing. My parents were brave and adventurous. I grew up in the tiny pacific island nation of Vanuatu; a land of volcano’s, cannibals, cargo cults, sacrificial pigs, Pentecostal bungee-jumpers, tree-houses and jungles, sharks and reefs.
Amusingly to friends today, I was the lone white kid in my class. I played my Ni-vanuatu friends after school, in their homes made from tin, cinder blocks, and sacking.
I cannot imagine a better way for a boy to spend a childhood.

One of the side-effects of such a remote upbringing was a lack of contact with the outside world. There was the odd cruise ship entering port, or the yearly VHS recording sent from family in New Zealand (which explains why I can recite Star Wars word-for-word), but not much on a local scale.

The sun rises and sets with precision timing and surprising swiftness that near the equator. My fondest boyhood memory is waking up, right on schedule, to the sunlight streaming through our bedroom’s wooden shutters, the illuminated dust dancing and glittering in the solid steam of light.
In the kitchen we’d hear the table set for breakfast. A bowl of 2 Weetbix, UHT milk from a box, a glass of orange cordial.

My Dad, sat at the end of the table, would turn on the radio, and on the hour the iconic beeps of the BBC World Service would herald in the morning news from around the globe. Beep beep beeeeeeep.

Just hearing those 3 simple beeps takes me back to that breakfast table. I can see my Dad’s still-black beard. It’s warm and sunny outside.

Almost 20 years later I arrived in the cold, dark UK. Originally contracted to a small startup company, one of my dreams of my stay here was to work for the BBC.
So when my initial contract finished, and I was presented with a chance to work for BBC WorldWide I jumped at the chance – 1/3 pay cut be damned! I was working for the BBC!
It’s been a great year and a bit; I’ve had the honour of being a lead developer on the BBC’s homepage, and as a developer i’ve been full of purpose knowing my work will effect the lives of millions of users each day.

Sadly my time at the BBC is coming to an end as of today. I turned 27 years old a month ago and decided it was high-time to start chasing my own startup dreams – so, in a romantic display of independence, dressed in my Birthday Suit (I wear my suit 1 day a year) I handed in my notice and announced I was leaving.
I’ve met some great characters here. There’s a lot of talent within this organisation, and they’re capable of amazing things. I hope they get the opportunities to make them a reality.

Even today I like to think that somewhere, in some desolately isolated part of the world, there’s a young kid like me waking up and marveling at the dust dancing in the light, hearing the beep of his Dad’s Macbook in the dining room, and rushing to sit on his knee as they browse the news on the BBC’s homepage.
That sounds egotistical. But I hope the BBC’s reach continues with all these new technologies for many more generations; I only wish I could have somehow snuck the beep beep beeeeep onto the homepage.

My first FOWA (Future of Web Apps) conference has just come to a close. What a nice way to spend a few days!

I must say, my enthusiasm tank (fuel tank for enthusiasm?) has been well topped up by this week’s workshops, presentations and chats with the presenters (I’m always so amazed by these smart people who manage to also stand up on stage and give an entertaining recital of their knowledge)

A summary of my thoughts

To me it seems like we’re currently experiencing what I believe to be a burst of innovation and excitement about web technologies. After a down few years of waiting for the death of IE6 and for the corporate adoption of Web 2.0 (whatever that is) all of a sudden there seems to be a bright light on the horizon, with the introduction of future technologies such as HTML5 in modern web browsers.

• One exciting bit of tech presented at FOWA by Francisco Tolmasky (great name) was 280North’s Cappuccino framework and Atlas IDE products, which radiates a heart-warming glow with it’s professionally pretty graphics and user interactions, promising to provide an easy web-to-desktop development path aimed at Obj-J and web developers.

  If you’re not required to provide non-JS implementations of your work, then I’d suggest having a further look into Cappuccino and Atlas. They provide a nice toolkit for building complex web apps relatively quickly, and a big step forward in desktop integration.

• Opera’s HTML5 Doctor, Bruce Lawson, also had lots of interesting things to say on the topic of HTML5 and it’s readiness for prime time.

  Chatting with Bruce about the BBC’s (my employer) possible usage of HTML5 solidified my thinking; there’s lots of promise in the HTML5 spec, but it’s obvious it’s many years away from ready from production-ready usage. Great guy.

• PayPal’s doing some much needed work to improve their APIs with x.com (how much must that domain have cost!) It’s all useless of course until they can provide me with a way to easily implement recurrent credit card billing.

• Facebook’s recent release of their Translation Platform is very exciting for large multi-cultural players like the BBC. You can now simply ask your users to translate your site for you.

  Facebook Connect continues to pick up steam, providing you with easier ways to distributing your content and linking back into Facebook’s social features.

• Metrics for startup’s are massively important, AARRR, as we were told by Dave McClure in what must have been the ugliest slide deck ever (great content, it just felt like gonorrhea for the eyes). Google Analytics doesn’t cut it… but there doesn’t seem to be a suggested tool that does. Who’s going to build it?

• And it was great to meet and chat to the Wine-o Energiser Bunny that is Gary Vaynerchuk. Packed to the brim with bravado, and telling us we’re all shit and all to blame for our own failings.

  I challenged Gary after his talk about the validity of that statement; as a New Zealander, in a remote market geographically and financially, and the lack of community, how much of an advantage the average Yank grad has over the average Kiwi grad.

  I’ve always thought that the reason for the lack of successful young NZ Internet entrepreneurs has a lot to do with the lack of local role-models and funding.

  Gary assures me that if, like him, a kid in Jersey can self-fund a multi-million dollar business then so should anyone, no mater how geographically dispersed they are from the major world markets.

  That’s all easy to say – he’s not on a NZ exchange rate, and is selling wine to a market of many times that of NZ’s – but I think for digital-goods and services that’s certainly true, if not becoming true.

  So! Work hard, make something great, charge people for it. Simple.

While the author notes it might not be the sexiest gift to give this year, it must be reaching the common perception that it’s at least cool, relative to other accounting apps anyhow.

A big congratulations to the Xero team. It’s just one more feather in their cap. Go team, go!

You should be able to configure your AppEngine applications to use HTTPS on any appspot.com domain name.

It’s not every day that we get a quality new web browser.

Google have been working on their web browser, dubbed Chrome, for around 2 years now. It includes a number of inovative features, including interface design elements like its “omnibox”, and functionality delegating tabs into their own monitorable processes.

Having an easy way to monitor the client-side rendering performance of a web page (as opposed to the traditional server-to-client performance) will open up a new realm of performance analysis and improvements.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that.

The V8 JavaScript VM is also another exciting development. The new engine “compiles” the JavaScript for native execution, as well as improving Garbage Collection (GC) performance.

Google’s V8 JavaScript VM even has its own benchmarking suite, which humbly includes my own JavaScript RayTracer (a proudly CPU intensive bit of JavaScript :)

Jakob Nielsen, a pretty divisive figure in web-development (developers and designers often loath him, the switched on people agree with him), has released a summary of the Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 Best App UI list for 2008, which includes Xero in it (my previous employer).

That’s pretty cool. I’m a huge fan of the work of Don Norman and Tog so any association with them (no matter how weak) makes me chuffed.

IMG-2-JSON gains some traction

IMG2JSON was a quick project to learn some Python and App Engine stuff, but it’s been featured on AppSpot’s Gallery, Ajaxian and delicious/popular/ today, and that’s given it a bit of a boost in usage.

MyJobCaddy.com goes live — go sign up!

A contract job I’ve been working on for the past couple months has gone live yesterday.

MyJobCaddy.com is a new idea for the UK recruitment market, and it also provides help for those in the UK returning home (to NZ, SA, or AU for example).

The usual process of getting work in the UK is to make a bunch of appointment with recruitment agents (since almost all work is handled through agencies), go on into to all 10 of them, fill out all their forms, provide them with your CV, proof of identification, previous addresses for the past 5 years, proof of employment for the past 5 years, details of any holidays within the past 5 years, do a formal interview with them, and finally get put on their books.

That’s a lot of hassle to go through for each agency you sign up with!

MyJobCaddy is a central hub for this process – effectively myJobCaddy does most of the leg-work for you. You enter your details into myJobCaddy (once!) and they’ll filter out your details to all their partner agencies (all high quality, respected, and well-connected providers of high paying jobs) and get them to work quicker finding you work in the lucrative UK market.

The site is currently aimed towards finance professionals (since most workers coming to the UK to make money are accountants or professionals).

I threw the app together in about an hours work, and while it does a pretty simple job, it does it using the speed of Google’s infrastructure.

The application is designed to return a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) string providing metadata about an image URL that has been passed as a querystring parameter. The metadata extracted can be as simple as providing information about the image’s width, height, file size, and mimetype, but it also extracts EXIF metadata.

EXIF metadata contains a variety of information and is commonly used in digital cameras to stamp the image with information like the date the photo was taken, the camera model and manufacturer, camera orientation, and even GPS coordinates.

Go try the live demo on the IMG·2·JSON home page or find out more information on how to use the service

EngineYard, it has to be said, are a lot more expensive, but for the money you’re effectively gaining a full time IT team to fully manage your servers for you. And being full-time Ruby and Rails guys means you can sleep well at night knowing they’re doing it well.

EngineYard Capistrano (eycap) Scripts

I thought I’d share a link to their Capistrano scripts, hosted on Github – who it turn are, in a chicken and egg sort of way, hosted by EngineYard.

Learning the bare minimum of how to use Capistrano was quite a painful process when I started out about 3 months ago, so I think this may be of value to some people looking for advice.

The master tree is located over at http://github.com/engineyard/eycap/tree/master/

Some handy finds so far:

• Cloning DB from Prod to Staging [this rocks my world]
  http://github.com/engineyard/eycap/tree/master/lib/eycap/recipes/database.rb
• Filtered Remote Cache deployment strategy
  http://github.com/engineyard/eycap/tree/master/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/strategy/filtered_remote_cache.rb
• And :tail_production_log
  http://github.com/engineyard/eycap/tree/master/lib/eycap/recipes/slice.rb

Moving house is always a hassle, but this week has been pretty extranordinary. I’ve recently moved into some more permanent accomodation in London, just a stones throw from the Thames in Surrey Quay, and it has been absolutely painful.

Being a web developer means I have a physical addiction to network connections; take me away from an RJ45, Ethernet, 802.11 or GSM signal for a day or so and I start to get the shakes. I’m often mistaken for a recovering heroine junky on family holidays.

So the first port of call for any new house is to organise the internet connection. So, long story short, after 5 days of ringing BT to organise them to connect my phone line back up I have yet been able to place an order due to their “systems” being down… what ever the fuck a “system” is… these people have forgotten how to use a pen and paper to take orders?

How does a company survive without taking orders for 5 days?!

By this stage I’m getting cold sweats, so I crawled on into the local Phone4U store to buy a wireless 3G modem to hold me over.

The 3 Network isn’t actually too badly priced (especially in the recent revelations of Vodafone NZ’s raping of its tech-savy iPhone customers); £50 for the modem on Pay-as-you-go, and £15 for 3GB of data (and no regular monthly cost).

Another long story short, after buying it and strugling to get a connection all day I took it back to the store, another 2 hours talking to them an sitting on the phone to 3 I’ve finally got it replaced.
At one point the sales guy literally got up and left, told me to take care of the phone, and if the 3 network guy came back from on-hold to take over… wow.

My Kiwi friend (and new arrival in London) who works in retail was just sitting there silently stunned at it all. He assures me back home you’d be getting a good bollocking from the manager right about then.

So 5 days after moving in, still no phone line, no broadband DSL in sight, and no running hot water.

And it’s raining.

(I’m getting into this moaning Pom thing quite well I think)