James Titcumb

Yep, I just asked Hannah to marry me, and she said yes, so I’m happy. Now for some drinkies!

OK, so after a couple of comments today about the slowness of loading the new Total Carange site, I’ve decided to stop using the Ext JS library. It’s very nice and all that, but on my slow server, it’s slow as hell. I’d much rather stick to some simple Javascript that I wrote myself and limit it to just that. It’s a simple site, and should load quickly, not in the 20-30+ seconds it has been today. Maybe one day when I get a fast upload speed I’ll look into using it again, but for now, it’s a no-go.

Anyway, after working at the IFE company I used to work for and dealing with enormous amounts of Javascript in web applications, I’ve had enough of masses of JS. Use JS to enhance, not as a basis.

Something I’ve defended in conversation for some time has been my choice to quit college before even attaining AS Level qualifications. I maintain still that it has been worthwhile doing this and building my career in development by hard graft. And it has been hard for me, but I’m so happy with the results I’m getting.

Lets take a look for a moment at what would’ve happened if I’d have followed the standard route of A-Levels, following that onto Uni. I would’ve done finished my Media Studies, Mathematics, Computing and Physics A-Levels. Congratulations, 2 years in college, only marginally increased prospects of a job. I would’ve then gone to Uni, most likely a Computer science or IT-related degree. Three or four years later, I’ve got a degree. And a whopping big debt. And most likely, no job. I’d find a job to tide me over, something I’m not interested in doing (like 1st-line tech support for example), and tried to find a better job. I’d still have a big debt. By luck one day, I land a junior developer job for a company. I’d get paid in the region of 16-20k salary I expect. Not bad for a 21/22 year old. I’d still have a massive amount of debt though. Plus because I’d be earning over the student loan repayment threshold, I’d have to start paying it off. So that would start coming out my pay packet. In this situation, I imagine looking into the future and seeing myself earning 30k+, slowly paying off my debts accrued from student life. Not bad.

Now look at what I’ve actually done. I quit college 4/5 months into the first year. I got a crappy job at Burger King. I moved out on my own at 17, started working at Marks & Spencers for a month or two. I found a Junior test job at a software developer firm in Chichester, getting paid a pitiful £9,600 / year salary. Within a couple of months, I’d proven to them that I could code, and I was quickly promoted to a software developer. I went on to gain 4 years of professional experience in PHP, Javascript, Linux, and loads of other bits. Armed with this experience, I went off to find a new job. I dabbled in .NET for a couple of months, and didn’t like that. So I got my job here, and I won’t say how much I earn as people who I work with read this Nevertheless, I’m 21/22 now, and earning more than I would’ve done had I gone to Uni at this stage in my life. I worked really hard to get here, but I think it was worth it. My future now, is the same as above, minus the huge debt acquired from student life.

I do have debts, but thats because I was rubbish with money. But that’s a different story.

I read a very good article on degrees and the value of them on MSN news, so have a read of it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

It may seem trivial, even pathetic to celebrate such a tiny milestone compared to 99.999% of the blogosphere, but it gives me a little satisfaction to know that roughly 15 people were subscribed to my blog yesterday, which is the highest recorded in my Feedburner stats. On average while I’ve been collecting my feed stats, I’ve had 10 subscribers, so thanks to those who keep reading! I’m slightly shocked, in fact, that anyone at all reads this!

I’ve done a little more work on the re-re-vamped Total Carnage site. It’s starting to take shape and look a little more like a real website now. So far, the niceness only works in Firefox as I’m using solid div background colours with an alpha-blended PNG to add highlights. I’m led to believe this technique can be used in Internet Explorer, but I’ve got to look into this still (due to IE’s inability to display alpha-blended PNG images…). The idea of doing things this way is to eventually have a user-configurable colour scheme. I’m basing it on a pasty-orange colour to start with, but I might change that, but of course, doing things this way makes it easier to change the colour scheme.

Under Jon from work’s recommendation, and some research by myself I found out it’s better to use XHTML 1.0 as silly IE doesn’t understand valid XHTML 1.1 properly as it does not accept the application/xhtml-xml content-type header properly. I’m not bothered either way, but I’m making sure it’s valid XHTML and CSS all the way. You might notice that the Ext JS isn’t valid CSS, so I base the “valid CSS” theory on just the CSS I’ve written, which is technically cheating a bit, but I don’t have the time/energy to go through all the Ext JS stylesheets and make them valid CSS.

The whole seperating the content from the design thing is going well nonetheless, and have a look here if you want to see how the site is progressing.