Big Andy's Blog

The Year 2010

To start again you have to let go of the past and move forward to free yourself of the baggage that weighed you down. This is what I want to do with this post, to finalise the year 2010 and get ready to embrace 2011.

For me the year that was 2010 was an incredible year full of life changing activities and one where a number of big goals were completed. I’ll list them here:

• Proposed to my now fianceé Marion on the top of Glastonbury Tor – June.
• Completed my “Masters CIW Designer” course thus ending a long 2.5 year journey – December.
• I Became a front-end Web Developer for Heath Wallace and beginning my career in web- August.
• Quit Thames Water and thus ending my career  in Chemistry – July.
• Completing the toughest long-distance walking route – Corisca’s GR20 – with Marion – September.
• I passed my course in Digital Photography – January.

My next post will contain what I want to do in 2011 so keep your eyes out for that! Until then, adios amigos!

I passed!!!

This is the end of a long journey which I started a long time ago. In April 2008 I persuaded myself and my girlfriend (now fiancee) Marion that I wanted to change career and it would be great if I would do some training in web design—something that I had been dreaming of ever since teaching myself to code after graduating from university—and she pointed out an advert to Advent Training who had been doing lots of adverts on the TV and internet at the time.

The first two modules of the “Masters CIW Designer” course were CompTIA A+ and A+ Technician exam. Basically to get me to be able to install, fix, troubleshoot any hardware or software in Windows. I really enjoyed being able to learn more about what goes on inside the computers and was able to learn a lot of useful stuff.

The next module—the first of the CIW modules—was called CIW Foundations. It taught a little about coding, but was mostly about networking, business and very basic web stuff.

The penultimate module, CIW Site Designer, was my favorite and was mostly about coding websites in different languages (although mainly HTML). I read a lot of other books at the time, books about Web Standards, Usability, and went to several UX meetups in London, I revamped my own website using all that I’d learnt and started applying for jobs in web design/development. I got the job that I was dreaming of and thus made my own progression from Chemist to Web Developer. It was after passing this exam that I found out that the company that I was doing the course through—Advent Training—had gone bust and I was thus left in a haitus not knowing whether I could finish my course. Luckily a new company came along and I could continue my course.

The final exam was CIW E-commerce and it really sucked. I hate most (though not all) of the topics and studying was a nightmare because of my new job and not having the energy or motivation to sit down and study after a long day on the computer at work. So this month I have taken a number of days off as holiday from work and stuck to it, learning and revising the subjects in the book. Today I took the exam in Wokingham and passed with 84% (the pass mark was 68%). I am very happy now as you can imagine! You can call me a “CIW Web Design Professional” if you’d like to. Otherwise Andy is good for me;)

Now I can focus on enjoying life a little and absorbing the festive Christmas atmosphere. After Christmas I will start to learn French.

Sunday Morning

Good morning to all out there on this beautiful brilliantly cold ice-blue Sunday morning! On the stereo is Mercury Rev’s “All is But a Dream” and I’ve just finished a glass of delicious orange juice.

Recently I have been quite busy learning more about wordpress and how to customise it further. How to add custom javascript libraries, custom CSS. All that’s happening can be seen over at my test blog. I am using the starkers HTML5 theme as a starting point and also using the HTML5 boilerplate CSS reset so that I am working from a base-line so that any changes I make make it mine even more. Experimenting with CSS3 and also learning more about PHP and how PHP is implemented in wordpress. Yes I am having a great time!

Outside the air is cold and frost lies on the ground and inside I wonder if it’s now time to have some breakfast, time to get moving onwards with the day and then do some studying (I am revising for the final module of my Masters CIW course).

Monday Morning!

The weekend flew past and it’s Monday morning. Before I go to work I will tell you what’s been going on since last I wrote. I passed my penultimate CIW exam – CIW Site Designer – with 91%, went to London Web Standards (about accessibility), had my first ever IT job interview, to the (6th) annual Pidgeon Walking Weekend in (Herefordshire), and to my brother’s birthday drinks in London.
Otherwise I have been learning about the Typographic Grid (with help from Mark Boulton’s site, and Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop” book) and learning some PHP.

This week I am going away somewhere (either Bath or Brighton) to celebrate the three years that Marion and I have been going out together. Tonight I am going to London Web Standards which tonight is about HTML5 and Flash.

Weekend and Studying

Sunday afternoon and the birds are cheeping, otherwise it’s quiet and I am taking a break from studying. This week has been a busy one with my first ever Reading Geek Night with Mike Robinson talking about “HTML5 Today”, Mark Adams “Geeks are Gods”, Chris Alexander on “Darks arts of SEO” and Workhouse Coffee’s “Coffee Geeks”. Wednesday we went to see Foals play at the Academy in Oxford, preceded by an excellent meal in Coco on Cowley Road. Thursday night. Otherwise this week I have been studying and coding.

Coding

Currently on the coding side of things I am working on putting the top 3 (or 5) blog.big-andy.co.uk headlines, with a small summary, on the main page of my site big-andy.co.uk.
So far I have succeeded in getting information e.g. headline, summary on a page on my test site but that still needs some more work before it will go on my main site. Also I have been working on some JS and PHP.

Studying

This week has been intense. I have been doing lots of online mock exams as well as practising areas that I need to improve on. This morning and last night I took 3 online “Full Exam” exams and scored 93% then 96% respectively. I think I am ready for the proper exam and to move onwards.