© 2012 The Approachable Geek
Yes, the title is a little bit silly, but it’s been a fun year so I thought it was time to reflect a little.
2011 started with me taking a few months out from The Approachable Geek to form and built a new company. Over the first 4 months of the year weddingtales.co.uk was born, shaped, coded and launched along with James Rutherford though The Difference Engine. By the end of 2011 we’ve handled over 1,500 wedding guests and nearly 10,000 wedding photos.
Whilst building weddingtales.co.uk I did a few consulting jobs, mostly data thrashing including preparation for a huge Sage data import (155,000 product records needed cleaning before they got into the system) and some quick and dirty Excel data jobs too.
In March I had one of my most challenging yet rewarding jobs of the year delivering a one day course for 12 to 17 years olds getting them up and running with Arduino circuit boards (and vibrobots). A really tough day (for me) but one of the most satisfying.
The early summer saw some more Excel jobs, including reducing the hours a local estate agency spent matching payments to tenants by as much as 15 hours a week by building a smarter and more automated spreadsheet. I also helped deliver the Blog It! masters course for Newcastle University, learning a lot about the common problems non-techies face with using domestic IT kit along the way.
Late summer though to the end of the year has had be focussing on two main projects, one writing complex data-capture scripts and social data storage mechanisms and the other being my most challenging project to day – running the Design It Built It conference. More on that another time,
2012 is virtually upon me and as I type this I’m booked up until April which is a pleasant situation to be in. DIBI is going to take up a lot of time, as is a new longer running project, but more news on that another time.