Henry Rose

It’s been forever since I’ve posted over here, so, quick update.

For the last month I’ve been working on a game designed to teach teens some consumer skills. It’s bankrolled by the National Consumer’s League and is … almost … really cool.

Anyway it’s bee a lot of php which has been good experience. Also some XML and Flash, another two things that are good to work on.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about the project is having some say in experience decisions (mostly because I build it up ;)). But working on something that’s designed for kids is an interesting problem space that I haven’t thought about a whole lot before.

A big part of the project has been reworking some exsisting php to allow for the rapid rebranding and re-deployment of the game. For example,  we used to just offer the game to high school students in the fall, but now we’ve got rebranded versions for a spring semester competition, as well as for middle school students.  Re-purposing the existing code has taught me a great deal about architecture for this site of web application.

Ok… now to fix the last  round of bugs, yeah right.

So i started my first “career job” a couple weeks back as an independent web contractor. I’m currently working for LUX Media doing XHTML/CSS layouts and then connecting them to the the content management system we use (cmsms).

My biggest fear going into this was that my technical skills would not be up to snuff, but so far i’m doing just fine in that regard. I am very happy that i bought and read Andy Budd’s book CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Thus far the only realy problem is that i haven’t gotten paid. But that’ just because i don’t know if they’re just going to hand me a check, or it’s going to come in the mail or what. I invoiced them and they acknowledged it. I’m going to have to learn more about taxes as an independent contractor. But for the meantime i just know i have to save some to give to the man at the end of the quarter.