blogitech from Chris Maddern

I don’t often talk about my job on here, mainly because it’s not often relevant. But recently I’ve been in a lot of meetings / discussions about creating a system to keep the executives up to date on the progress of various projects.

It was an interesting meeting in which the system changed from a spreadsheet to a full implementation of Microsoft Project, but I left with lots of words in my head like ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. It took days for the association to hit me but it all sounds to me rather like the job for a blog.

Each entry could be an update tagged with a project title among other keywords. Wordpress could even be slightly modified to store progress of each category along with a few other key pieces of information, but essentially it seems like it could work; you could browse by category for a chronological update of the status of projects. It may even be more advantageous for the developers as they gain the scope of explaining any potential issues to a third party (albeit virtually).

I’m not sure if this has been done before / is implemented anywhere but would be very interested to hear any thoughts on the matter or any experiences.

Chris

For the next few weeks I’m staying with my family and because it was for more than a few days, and I have quite a lot of work to do, I figured that I’d bring all my hardware with me. Also, how could I not keep you all updated!?

I now have my rig set up in a room less than a quarter of the size that it was designed for so screens and speakers sort of rule supreme in here! It’s almost cool, but in a ‘I-don’t-want-to-get-used-to-this’ sort of way!

At home, I’m sort of a workaholic; my main project at the moment (a music recommendation and ticket sales integration application called ‘Giggle’) takes up a good deal of my time often keeping me up programming until 3am. When I’m not doing that I’m blogging / twittering / reading up on what’s new. (Besides that, I actually have a moderately healthy social life; I just don’t often mention it here) (HONEST).

Now that I’m here, work seems like a less obvious thing to do. I will often sit bored for a while thinking that I have nothing to do rather than actually get on with the work I know I have!

This brings on the question, how important are surroundings to productivity. I always thought that I could work anywhere, and often work at home, in Starbucks, other cafes… etc, but can a certain environment bring out a certain quality in you.

I hope not, because I have a lot of work to be doing!!

Anyway… next post will be more tech-related! Promise!

Chris