There seem to be a few questions to answer before actually starting a blog. What will the content be? How often will I post? How will I start it? When will I stop procrastinating and actually do it?
This sentence answers all those questions in one - (see below; whenever something substantial falls out of my brain; with a random post; a few posts ago)
With the realisation that a blog that has a shaky start is better than no blog at all, it's time to get this thing off the ground. First let me introduce myself. My name is Adam Creeger. I work as a "Technical Architect" for AKQA London, a leading light in the murky world of Digital Advertising. They used to call themselves an interactive marketing shop, but I guess the advertising industry shifted itself our way, and swallowed us up in the process.
What is a Technical Architect at an ad agency? Good question. I get to spend most of my time designing (think UML - not crayons), mentoring, experimenting, talking to the people that pay the bills and occasionally coding. Somewhere amongst this I get to observe - and even influence - the running of some pretty intense projects. Pushing boundaries under tight timeline pressures with challenging resourcing issues makes for an interesting day.
Traditionally (7 years professionally), I've been devoted to the art of .NET and all things Microsoft, especially C#/ASP.NET. These days though, I've broadened my horizons to include RIAs (Flex, AIR, WPF, and of course the AJAX/DHTML combo), functional languages and the fall and rise of the dynamic language (including Powershell). At the end of last year, I stepped back in time and did some award winning, brain-taxing work (transitive closures, anyone?) in Actionscript 2. Learning a new language is always fun, but having to do without all the goodness of C# (au revoir Typed Arrays, Generics, Run time type checking to name a few) makes it well, let's just say, intriguing. Right now I'm recovering from giving birth to Fiat eco:Drive - one heck of an AIR project. Most importantly though, I get to work with some inspirational people who astound me with their passion for this game.
I'm going to write about all these things. There's plenty of room for discussion on all fronts, but I imagine I'll spend a fair amount of time on the art of software development itself. What makes for a successful project? Why do smart programmers fail to produce applications that work? Why are project management techniques so hit and miss? How do you ensure teams in different time zones get along just fine? These questions have been answered before, but perhaps not from the inside of an advertising agency where the projects are many and the risks, rewards and pressures are high. There'll be a few tech-heavy posts too, stuff I discover along the way etc etc. Whatever happens, I'm sure this will evolve into something beyond what I imagined in this paragraph.
Thank you, and good night.
