Blog What I Made

So I’ve left Multimap and I’m no longer a Microsoft employee, I have relinquished my blue badge and handed in my laptop. I’ve really enjoyed working at Multimap. The people I’ve worked with have all been friendly, incredibly intelligent and fun to be around. Not only has working with them been great, but the many times we’ve managed to meet up outside work has also been fun, including my wedding and stag do and lots of other occasions too.

Three years ago Fake Ed Parsons came to me in a dream and told me the secret to draggable maps. I knocked something up and then sent an email through to Multimap. Apparently the email was passed on to Sean Phelan, the founder of Multimap, who then passed an email around the senior management asking which of the following options they should use:

1. Tell me to stop
2. Sue me
3. or offer me a job

I’m obviously quite happy that they decided to go with the 3rd option! I worked for Multimap as a contractor for 6 months and then started working there full time at the end of September 2005. Since then I’ve worked on the API full time. Though I’ve written nearly all of the JavaScript in the API it wouldn’t be much use without the work put in by others in the team to build the many great web services that it uses. “Tiling the world” to make sure we had map tiles and imagery in as many places around the world as possible was also a huge undertaking that went really well. I’ve spent the last month or so knowledge sharing and I’m confident that the people who will be taking on the API work from now on will have no problem. I’ll also be doing contract work for Multimap in the near future too so I won’t be completely hands off on it.

The photo above shows my blue badge before I handed it back but I thought it would be amusing to also show an old business card of mine with it. Before I started working for Multimap I actually worked for a Manchester web agency - Fast Web Media. When I started working there they were actually a subsidiary of “FAST Search and Transfer” and were working on a “soccer search engine”. That project was eventually shelved but the company continued doing it’s flagship Premiership football scores and news website and started taking on more client work. Though they were eventually spun out from FAST to be a separate entity, FAST continued to hold the largest single share in the company. Fast forward to now and we find that Microsoft has bought FAST. The sale appears to have gone through so now it seems that Microsoft will now own the largest share of my old company. This is a fact I’m thinking I should highlight to any potential companies that I might work with, every company I work for gets bought by Microsoft!

A few weeks ago I handed my notice in to Multimap. My last day will be Friday 18th July. While I’ve really enjoyed my time here I’ve decided that I want to branch out and try some new things. I’ve had the privilege of designing and building one of the most important products that Multimap has delivered over the past 3 years - the Multimap JavaScript API. Specialising in this way has been a great experience but I’m intending to broaden my horizons to cover more back-end technologies, which is where most of my previous experience has been.

My intention is to start doing freelance work once I have completed my notice period with Multimap. I have arranged work with some good friends that should keep me pretty busy for the first few months after leaving but a large part of what I’m looking for in the future is variety so I will be very interested to hear from other friends who have interesting projects that they might like my help with.

Due to contractual obligations I may be looking to minimise the amount of geowanking I do for the first few months. Fortunately I do have five years experience in PHP, three years experience of intensive JavaScript coding and various bits of experience in Ruby on Rails and even a little Python. I also have good experience in setting up Linux-based web and database servers. I’ve been using and contributing to the interweb for something like 14 years, so yes, I do remember Netscape 1.0 (background images!), the launch of Yahoo! and the BBC’s wonderful “list of interesting web pages”. I was also putting music online when Shawn Fanning was probably sleeping peacefully in his dorm room, and I was doing it legally (I think)!

If you are interested in hiring me then you might like to take a look at my CV which you can find here (yes I know I need to replace the dodgy matrix). If you want to get in touch then you could try contacting me on my linkedin.com page, or just email me at my first name @ my surname dot net. If you’re having trouble getting me then drop a comment on this page and I’ll get in touch with you. I’m not looking to hear about a thousand unsuitable posts from agencies but if someone from an agency has something flexible to offer that’s relevant and can fit in with my other obligations then that will be fine.

I will still be attending the State of the Map conference this weekend. I’m really looking forward to it and it promises to be a lot of fun. I will also be representing Multimap for the last time while giving a presentation on “Using Crowd Sourced Data in a Commercial API” which I’m hoping will be interesting enough for those that attend. If the conference is anything like last year though there will be plenty of good presentations to contend with.

Technorati tags: resignation, multimap, microsoft

Wow, before starting this blog post I thought I’d check the date on my previous post. I haven’t written anything in nearly three months! That’s pretty terrible so I’ll try to do a few more posts sometime. I’ve been pretty busy with a number of other things recently but that’s no excuse, I know interesting things have happened that I should have found the time to mention.

I guess the biggest of the things that have been restricting my time recently was the recent redesign of the Multimap.com site and the availability of Microsoft Virtual Earth content within the Multimap API. Oddly enough, this was the third time that I’d worked on a project to pull VE content into our API. The first two times we had done it by wrapping VE’s API into our own, passing function calls to our API onto VE’s where necessary in a similar fashion to OpenLayers Base Layers. Though this gave us access to VE content and allowed us to resell the content to the UK Yell.com site, it was never going to be the best method. The finished product required loading the entirety of both APIS (nearly 300KB just for JS), and because we only had access to exposed functionality resulted in some odd behaviour, such as when our API and VE’s were both trying to smoothly pan a map to a new location.

In December of course we were bought out by Microsoft and as a result were able to get direct access to their imagery. Making use of VE’s maps and aerial data was fairly simple but including the Bird’s eye imagery was a little more difficult. Fortunately with the help of a few guys at MS who sent through some source code, and with the existing good “custom map type” functionality in the Multimap API, I had a good working model pretty soon. We then spent a long time trying to come up with a really good way of communicating “Bird’s Eye” mode to users. Though we had trials and tribulations along the way I think we did pretty well with the solution we came up with, it’s live on multimap.com if you want to take a look (or see the screenshots above and below).

Another thing that I’ve been trying to get sorted out is the server that hosts my blog. I’ve been using the same dedicated server for a good 4-5 years now. That server was hosted at Sago Networks and it’s been through a lot, including Florida hurricanes, but has recently started hanging on a regular basis. A replacement NIC a few weeks ago gave promise of a reprieve but it has again crashed since then. Though I’ve had really good service from sago who have been happy to manually fsck it every time it went down recently, I decided I had to go with price and have now switched to Hetzner. Their prices were too good to miss, and though the fact that I don’t speak a word of German has caused a few issues along the way everything seems to be going well with it now.

I’ve even decided to be all modern and am hosting my site on a VMWare Server virtual machine. I’m hoping that this will allow me more control over that machine, making it safer to upgrade and reboot as I’ll always be able to get access to the console through VMWare. Hopefully it’ll also make things much easier when I eventually decide to move to a new server again (I’ve had this new server for a month now and have only just found the time over the long weekend to move everything across!) I’m also hoping it will lend me a little more security by allowing me to segregate important sites that I need to keep secure away from older less reliable code.

One other thing to mention, I’m going to San Francisco next week! Where 2.0 is the second most important conference for location based services providers (the most important, of course, being OSM’s State of the Map) but in past years I haven’t been able to attend. Fortunately this year some budget has turned up and I together with four of my colleagues will be there. Though the main event is the O’Reilley conference, I’ll also be going along to WhereCamp 2008 the following weekend, and as many other events as I can cram in on the Thursday and Friday between. If you’re going and I don’t already know it then get in touch with me on twitter or friend me on the WhereCamp site.

I’m also intending to map my journey there as much as possible, I have to get from Liverpool to London on Friday night, over to Heathrow on Saturday morning and then fly to San Francisco International airport at lunchtime (leaving 10am, arriving 1pm, still freaks me out ;-). Obviously it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to log anything while I’m flying but I’ll do my best, and I shouldn’t have too much problem on the train down. Check back later this week when I’ve figured out how I’m going to share my location with you

Just a quick one to mention a friend’s band that have a new single out this week. Parka are a great band originating from Glasgow but currently residing in East London. They’ve been around for a couple of years but are preparing for the launch of their debut album with the re-release of their “manic anthem” Disco Dancer. Mark, the keyboard player for the band, used to work for Multimap and I first heard this single just over a year ago. Instantly loved it but at the time it wasn’t available to buy or download (legally).

In December a collection of Multimappers went down to see them play in a small club off Tottenham Court Road. Though they weren’t headlining (they were on second) they were definitely the best band who played on the night and had a good selection of really great sounding songs. I’m definitely looking forward to their debut album but for now I’ll have to make do with the single.

You’ll see a little flash widget thingey on the right which you can use to have a quick listen to the track but I recommend you head over to their website - parkamusic.com - where you can listen to the whole song (it’ll start playing a random track, to hear Disco Dancer keep skipping until it comes up, there’s also a remix which is pretty good too). If you like the track then you know what to do, either follow the links on their website to buy it or head over to disco.parkamusic.com to be linked straight to the shop. They have a special pack of the 7″ Vinyl and CD that I’ve gone for, or you can just buy the CD using the link at the bottom of the page. I believe it’ll also be available on iTunes and probably other music download sites too.

Final note, they’re currently finishing off a tour - they’ve still got dates around the country for the next few months - I’m planning to go to their Liverpool gig on the 26th February so if you want to come along and you’re in the area, give me a shout.

After taking numerous attempts to write this blog post and going into far too much detail I’ve decided to trim it down to a few paragraphs, I’ve got a few other ideas for posts but really should get this one out first!

First, the wedding. The day went really well and surprisingly smoothly. Everybody that we’d picked to help us out with our wedding was brilliant and helpful. About the biggest problem was the DJ (hired via an agency) but then it’s no big surprise to hear of a wedding DJ playing crap music. Apart from this the day was amazing, it was just great to be able to get all of our friends and family together and have a big party. It’s also great these days that with the wonders of modern technology we managed to see lots of photos taken on the day before we even went on honeymoon!

Secondly, the honeymoon. We spent an amazing three weeks touring around China (Beijing, Xian, Guilin), visiting Hong Kong, and lazing on a beach in Koh Samui, Thailand. The culture and heritage in China was incredible, and our guides were really good at telling us all about it. Hong Kong was smoggy and cold (air conditioning!) but still an interesting place to visit. Finally Koh Samui was just a really nice place to relax for a week.

We travelled on 9 flights on our trip (going to and from the far east via Dubai) and apparently used 7 tonnes of CO2 to do it. Fortunately that’ll only cost us about £50 to offset apparently so we’ll probably do that soon. We used 4 currencies and needed 3 visas but it was all worth it for the great time we had, evident in the 830 photos that I took (select few now showing on flickr!)

So, I’ve kept this short, but if you’re interested in hearing more about the honeymoon then just drop me a line or ask me when you next see me. I’ll end this blog post in the only way appropriate by saying: my wife and I thank all of our friends for helping us make our wedding day go so smoothly and for helping us have such a great time.

Technorati tags: wedding, honeymoon