#clearleft

There is just under a week to go before I bid farewell to Clearleft on the 10th March. I have had a very happy and productive two and a half years working here, though it doesn't feel like it has been that long since I started.

Naturally I am sad to go, it has been great fun working and being part of a team of talented people. I've learned a lot and been very lucky to have had the opportunity to work on some pretty cool projects over the years, including WWF's panda.org, the Mozilla Addon's site and so many more.

I feel I have done some very good work during my time here, both for individual project builds, giving talks and workshops on CSS and CSS3, generally helping out with events such as dConstruct and Uxlondon. Also in introducing a systematic approach to web development—writing componentised maintainable CSS and HTML—which we now use for all of our projects.

It is always sad to leave: I really will miss my fellow Clearlefties. We have had lots of fun memories, many team outings, conferences, fridays at the pub, epic adventures at SXSW, in depth debates & discussions, general office banter, dressing up daft for Halloween etc. They have become more than just colleagues, they are good friends.

There are some exciting times for me on the horizon though, in addition to running the Brighton Marathon, working on some personal projects and getting married on June 5th to the lovely Simon Willison, I am also making myself available for freelance work. If you have any HTML / CSS / Javascript projects or need emergency cross browser CSS help—I'm your girl, feel free to drop me a line.

I tried to give blood today. Although I'm a registered donor I haven't been for quite some time, not since they turned me away for being anemic. Times have changed since then, you no longer get a free tub of Ben and Jerry's ice-cream, and it isn't against campus equal opportunities law to advertise the time and place to give blood. You can also book online now.

Naturally, for a large and important system, the online booking form isn't great. Just looking at the main issues (I'm sure there are a ton more): You search for your postcode to find the nearest donation center, in smaller areas it is probably not so much of a problem but there are three donation centers in Brighton, each identified only with 'BRIGHTON' and the distance. There is also an unexplained number of 'days'; what that means is pretty much anyone's guess. It could be the days in a week the donation bank is open, except the first result is '16 day(s)', last I checked there weren't 16 days in a week.

Clicking on a venue took me through to the page for that place, it was then that I realised there are '16 sessions at this venue' - what did that have to do with days!? Is that 16 sessions per day? Perhaps, though probably not.

A list of available sessions is shown. The little clock bullet point is cute, until you realise it is the only clickable area to get through to book a session on that day, and the next / previous buttons just take you through to more sessions - I spent ages trying to find how to book a session from this page!

Clicking the little clock brings up a popup window for your personal details, blocked by my popup blocker, nuff said. The options don't include the ability to change the date but do let you select a time that wasn't previously listed as available for that date, totally infuriating if you have clicked the wrong date, also how do you remember which times were OK?

I submitted my details to give blood that afternoon, then I notice in teeny tiny writing ...

If you want to book an appointment for the next day, you must book it Monday-Friday between 9am - 5pm. Unfortunately we cannot take appointments on a weekend for Mondays. We are also unable to accept appointments made for today, unless otherwise stated.

Now I understand that someone for some reason may need to check the details and respond personally but it does seem odd that you can't book for, say, the afternoon. Perhaps some routine behind the scenes where they only check the website once a day to correlate the books? To me this smells of bad practices underlying bad software implementation.

My theory was further confirmed when I received the following email from someone at the National Blood Service:

EBLOOD - Donor - Details don't match

Thank you for using the website to make an appointment. Unfortunately, our system will not let me do this and we need to speak to you to resolve this...

Despite giving them my phone details in the compulsory field that they made me fill in, I received no calls (they said they tried to call and failed). I called the booking helpline to sort things out, and apparently the "system doesn't work well when people change addresses". The problem was that they had two records for me and couldn't combine the details easily, so the lady had to send a form off to get 'them' to update my address on one of the records and delete the other one. I couldn't even go down to give blood and sort things out there because "they wouldn't know which record to use". Unbelievable.

One of the many sites Simon and I are collaborating on at the moment came into fruition in the (very) early hours of this morning.

Djangopeople.net aims to unite the Django community in their common allegiance of development environment. Until now the Django community’s spirit had been a victim of the documentation’s success, with such conclusive coverage people commonly don’t feel the need to venture into IRC channels, or mailing lists to ask for help.

A very simple site, Djangopeople is (currently) just a mechanism to say who you are, where you live, what your skills are and provide links to sites you have contributed to that run on Django. Naturally there are plans to develop this further.

So far uptake has been great, since we launched—About 15 hours ago—a total of 633 people have signed up and added their profiles. Which is really exciting!

Following an interesting conversation on Twitter this morning I thought I'd share the CV advice I was given by Andy Budd. Those of you in UX know who he is. Incase you've come from somewhere else he's a Director of world-class UX agency Clearleft and curator of UX London and dConstruct conferences. 

He admits he only uses CVs for one purpose. To find out whether it's worthing meeting you. What does he look for? I asked and there's quite a list:

Interesting past employers/roles showing some kind of career progression. An insight into the type of work you've undertaken before.

A reasonable estimation of your own skills and a sign that they match the skills the employer is looking for.

The fact that you can write well and tell a compelling story in a very short space.

That you come across as an interesting person rather than a corporate robot or a duche.

If its a design role, the fact that you've spent some time thinking about the best way to structure and communicate your skills.

He concluded with:

Bad, ugly or poorly structured design CVs go straight into the bin.

I think this advice is fantastic, no matter which industry you're trying to get into. The CV should only ever be a starting point, but getting it right will make the rest much easier. 

I've been working on Fontdeck since October 2010. This was my first experience of working on a startup project and it's been an incredible one.

Fontdeck was created as a joint project between Clearleft and OmniTI, it lets you use custom fonts on your website and sorts out all the fiddly stuff.

Since joining the project, I've been involved in refreshing every single page of the website and generally improving the experience. There's a great sense of satisfaction watching something take shape in this way, and getting to leave my mark on a site as prominent as Fontdeck is a huge privilege.

Because this project is internal to Clearleft, we have complete control over it. If I'm not sure which decision to make I just walk over to Paul, Andy or Rich and we can have a quick chat, ensuring that we make the best decision. When compared to typical client relationship, where communication is much more complex and often inefficient, we have a good thing here.

I feel a small team where every person can offer some specific skill set is ideal for Fontdeck; there's real momentum to the work going on. Perhaps with the pace of the internet being so incredibly fast, lean and mean is often a huge advantage.

I've been working as an intern at Clearleft for the past 2 months, and I'm having a great time.

As an intern, I had images of making endless cups of tea, and although I have attemted to fill that duty (sorry for the undrinkable tea Jeremy!) I've also been let loose on some pretty exciting stuff.

Firstly, I got to turn Paul Lloyds great designs into a reality on the Fontdeck blog, and just yesterday, we rolled out some new pages for viewing typefaces and fonts on Fontdeck.