Heading out on Monday for what was supposed to be a good week and a half off from work. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of working for yourself is that sometimes its really hard to get away from work. You try to tell everybody you are going to be away and work a bit harder before and after to try and make up for it, but sometimes you can’t avoid having to do some work. For example, I started a project two weeks ago that I thought would be finished by now, but it turns out it is going to take another week and the deadline is next week, while I’m gone. Good times! Ah well… at least I’ll get some time off. 
Archive for October, 2009
Working Vacation
Saturday, October 31st, 2009Whew! That’s over… back to normal.
Monday, October 5th, 2009The Calgary International Film Festival just wrapped up last night. I was lucky enough to work on it after being contacted by Brian Clegg over at 3.9 Marketing and it was a crazy ride over the last few months. During this time we built a new frontend site, upgraded admin tools, reworked their online box office software and rewrote their ticket taker software using AJAX. There were a lot of successes but also some areas that we’ve figured out need more work. I’m looking forward to working on improving those areas and making things run better.
A few things I learned:
- Allocate proper resources – I could have used some help on this project. It was a struggle to get things done in time and especially since my son was born halfway through.
- Don’t just use the client’s requirements for the build. Analyze the requirements and the client’s processes to see if they actually match up. Sometimes what they are asking for isn’t exactly what they need.
- If you are working on a festival and they want you to provide support during the festival, book that time so it is exclusive — tell your other clients that you are going to be unavailable during the festival, or find somebody to cover for you.
Now that CIFF is over, I can finally get around to doing a few things that I wasn’t able to during the festival:
- Clean my office
- Catch up on invoicing and bookkeeping
- Get back to studying for my Zend PHP certification
- Sleep
