David and Katherine Goodwin

The following is effectively an online version of a talk I gave to phpwm in July 2008.

Disclaimer!

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere

This is just a documentation of what I/we as “newbies” found ...

I've finally uploaded a few pictures to our website.

See :

• Rowan on his tummy
• Our new office
• Rachel's birthday cake (cake-pod anyone?)
• Emily's photos of us camping near Bromyard

Today, we moved to a nicer/bigger/better office within The Business Centre. This was prompted by a "Which would you prefer - a better office or a pay rise?" question to the minions, who all responded with "Better office". It's probably an understatement to say we were cramped in our previous one, but it was relatively cheap.

So - the good news (?) is that the employees now have a window to look out of - although the view is not really something to write home about - it is far better than no view.

Not wanting to complain, but I don't understand customers. Back in December, they seemed quite scarce - almost endangered. Now, they're everywhere. Perhaps January was "breeding season" or something.

I keep expecting everything to go really quiet, what with this "credit crunch" lark, but seemingly not. I'm not complaining.

We've just moved our ADSL around at work, and now Be works, we are connected at 17mb downstream, and 1mb upstream through the wonders of ADSL2 etc - which is far better than the 'crappy' 6mb we were getting from
Demon. Best of all, Be's cheaper :)

Imagine you're just about to go home, looking forward to 4 days of no work, when the phone rings....

• $Guy: Hi, I need some work done by Monday... budget is no problem, but we need it for Monday...
• $me: errm... that'll be kind of difficult seeing as how we're on holiday from now until Tuesday
• $Guy: Holiday? Oh, *pause* yeah....

This week, we are releasing our first full open source project.

It's basically a piece of web-based software, written in Python and PHP, that allows you to allocate tickets from multiple Trac projects to a simple week-based 'board' in order to organise work priority for developers.

We've scheduled some more PHP training courses up to June next year, running monthly.

People who are active members of Birmingham, Wolverhampton or Redditch and Bromsgrove LUGs or PHPWM can receive a discount of £25/day

See here for more details

The ebbs and flows of business

Not so long ago, the tumble weed was starting to blow around our office - we'd finished all our (paying) work, and had started to look into better marketing and advertising (the results of which are yet to appear). Up until now, we seem to have been lucky in attracting all our customers by word of mouth / referral.

Anyway, after a week of silence, the phone kept ringing. So, we went from near-nothing, to having to turn down work within a week.

Sam has just won some Fanta competition, and will now get a Nintendo Wii, a 26" LCD TV and more. Git.

See here for more information.